by Gary Indiana
Dane accepts the world the way it is. I don’t. Life is simple in his view. Any problem has a quick, visceral solution, or else it’s not worth thinking about. I find it difficult to live. He’s turned off by intellectualism and displays of strong feeling. We are wired differently. That doesn’t necessarily preclude the intimacy I long for, but with him, it does. We treat each other fondly, often with great tenderness. But that’s as far as it’s ever going to go. My stupidity amazes me today.
“Why are you getting so agitated? You’re a fucking Chihuahua. Relax. Slide down Mr. Stiffy, let him do all the work.”
“I’m jumpy. It’s my nature.”
“You’re jumpy because you take pills all day. You yip and babble in your sleep like a jumpy Chihuahua, on account of speed. I know you dream about dog food from a can. I hear you going yip yip yip. You know what you need? Quaaludes.”
“I don’t have a dealer for quaaludes.”
“Sure you do.”
He hops out of bed in his blond naked glory, rummages in a drawer, flings a baggie of round white pills at me.
“Take one now! Let it wash over you and carry you off to Neverland!” He assumes the voice of a detergent commercial: “You’ll be glad you did.”
“You think?”
“Take two! You’ll sleep in a state of bliss!”
In my mind, for decades, hooking up the way Dane and I did was “profane” love, which followed no evolving narrative pattern, a thing in and for itself, like God or a black hole, existing outside normal time in an alternate continuum where personal identity dissolved in roiling puddles of flesh.
Anything that felt good could happen there, if the energy was right: Bob and Chester, Dane’s housemates—essentially sweet, slow-witted, skinny guys with stringy beards and mustaches, cataleptically prone in the living room much of their semi-waking lives—did me occasionally at Dane’s instigation, sometimes separately, usually in tandem, while Dane watched and shouted directions, a circus barker with an invisible megaphone (“Sit on his face—that’s it, lick his asshole, but keep playing with yourself”), eventually joining us in a vaudeville finale. For a while, prowling the Valley and East Hollywood in his truck like a pair of serial killers, we picked up strangers at bars as they walked to their cars after closing time. On the huge, careening waterbed we plied guest lovers with weed and poppers to coax little fetishes and quirks from sealed-off rooms of their libidos. We assured them their secrets were safe with us, though later, when Dane and I were alone, we mimicked their peculiarities, aped the way they undressed, copied their segues between various acts, repositioning organs and holes, limbs and digits, repeating words and phrases they groaned or gasped out a moment before orgasm, exactly the way they had.
These escapades widened our repertoire inside the bubble where we knew each other more and more thoroughly as time passed. In other contexts we remained superficial acquaintances, two strangers at a restaurant or a movie theater stranded in each other’s company by the unexpected absence of a mutual friend.
It wasn’t what novels and movies and growing up with emotionally constipated parents had prepared me for, but nothing that happened to me ever was. The first sixteen years of life prepared me for absolutely nothing, actually. Long after I left Los Angeles, I still clung to a nebulous ideal of a lover who cared to know more about me than the fact that I had an unusually tight asshole and gave fantastic head. I fantasized about a domestic arrangement that would be a real story instead of a non sequitur.
In Los Angeles, I wasn’t ready for the stoicism my experience recommended to me. I couldn’t accept myself as a discrete being. I expected someone to mold me into something half me, half him. Later, it became clear that this blurred identity was only obtainable with people I never saw with their clothes on. In a related bolt from the blue, I realized that the only time I actually found melting together with anybody remotely pleasurable was when I had sex with them. I didn’t want it as a daily, domestic state of things at all. I couldn’t live with sexual lovers. I had, in fact, no real capacity for romance in that way. Only, now and then, with someone I cared about, felt tenderness for, could talk to, could sleep with at night if we first got sex permanently out of the way, and proceeded to have it exclusively with other people. By then I no longer viewed this as a terrible compromise with reality. It said nothing abject or horrible about me, either. Things were the way they were because, whether or not I acknowledged it, they were really how I wanted things to be.
Susan had tried hypnosis before, but we had both tried everything else, and she thought a group situation might work better than a one-on-one hypnotist had. We took a cab to an office building in midtown where roughly twenty people, mostly middle-aged, had assembled under fluorescent light in a room full of folding chairs. It looked like an AA meeting. The hypnotist vaguely resembled Lionel Stander. He explained the difference between the way hypnotists are portrayed in movies and how hypnosis “really works,” leading the group through various breathing exercises and other physical adjustments meant to induce a receptive state.
“Now. When the thought of smoking enters your mind, replace that thought with another one: ‘I need my body to live.’ Because, you see, your mind can only hold one thought at a time.”
Out on the sidewalk, we instantly scrambled for cigarettes and lit up. Puffing furiously, Susan said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “I think so. I’m thinking, ‘I need my body to live.’ ” Susan nodded. “The minute he said you couldn’t have two thoughts at the same time I knew he was full of shit.”
six
Premature Impossible to write about Werner, who exerted such influence for 30 yrs, first through movies & later force of personality. Werner dead almost three years, missing person whose absence makes the world small and unbearable. “What now happens to my soul”—Magdalena’s last words. Drawn to him by occult forces—plus Ila von Hasperg, Volker Spengler & Mostafa Djadjam—MD tried getting me to suck off Frederick S., the one whose hand got blown off in May ’68, in my room at Luisiane that winter D.W.’s neediness made me so miserable.
Need to meet Werner more urgent during stupid affair w Harald Vogel, worked for W on Weisse Reise. Maria Schneider. W a Byronic figure. I fell in love with his photograph. Thinner, prettier, more ethereal Oscar Wilde, cascades of silken hair framing long oval face. Not sure feelings were ever “sexual” despite sex. Felt complicity instead of desire. Harald’s friend Robbie. Parasite coke whore. Came to Oblovitz loft near the Trade Center. Rosemary, Barbara, Oblov, Christophe. The week before John Lennon was shot. Dancing w Barbara to “Double Fantasy.” Too much coke in the loft. Robbie supposedly producer of Harald’s film, but H never made the film. Pinched, nervy face, bald as a boiled egg. Looked like a retired banker who repairs clocks as a hobby. Worst kind of German stereotype, thought it was a put-on but it wasn’t.
I forgot all about him then 5 months later staying w Valie Export in Vienna, phone rings, it’s Robbie. “You said you wanted to go to Czechoslovakia.” How did he get the number or know I was there. But I went. Shows up driving really battered white Mercedes. Vienna to Brno him the whole time full of Nazi opinions. Hated him suddenly & thought I should [something crossed out] & also afraid of communism. Wldn’t let me go into Janáček Opera House. R took charge of everywhere we went ate everything.
Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázné, Prague. Spas. Castles. Museums, opera houses, theaters, Soviet monuments. He hated to do anything and nothing interested him, was only interested in blabbing Hitlerite viewpoint of Slavic races & swimming in large municipal pool in Prague. Figured out he was not a film producer but a used-car salesman. Gave Harald $200 for Super 8 film that H. spent on drugs. Mercedes battery already faltering in Vienna & had to be jump-started every time he turned the engine off. incessantly complaining, narrow-minded, grossly opinionated turd, Psychotic and cheap, two bad qualities. Told stories about Hitler, where Hitler liked to drink beer in Munich, how Hitler was right about invading these unimportant c
ountries because many Germans living in Poland & Czechoslovakia. Always insisted on cheaper hotel, cheaper café, cheaper restaurant than anywhere I wanted to go. Pieces of car fell off all over the countryside. In cities deliberately parked where getting battery charged by some total stranger he flagged down caused maximum havoc blocking traffic.
All R ever ate was sausages from street vendors. Thought seriously about murdering him w tire iron dumping his body in a lake & driving to Munich. Insisted we sleep in the car several nights to avoid paying for hotel. One time woke up & saw we were parked next to some top secret military installation.
We stopped speaking unless we had to. Suddenly he said we had to go right away to Munich which was all I was hoping for already for 10 days. Cristina the photographer (saw her 10 yrs later at Chateau Marmont where she was frosty to me) was not at her apt where I was supposed to stay, went with R to his place praying to god I wdn’t have to sleep there, it was also surprisingly dirty & messy for a Nazi apartment. He had no alcohol only ½ bottle of Cynar that shit made from artichokes. I drank the whole thing & then R says, “Well let’s go to the beer keller,” meaning Hitler’s favorite hangout, which he is still eager to show me though we hate each other’s guts at this point, but führerkeller ist geschlossen so we go to Harry’s. The Harry’s maître d’ can see that R is a complete loser so gives us a bad table, downstairs. We drink for four hours R the whole time being a total asshole even singing “Horst Wessel Song” in a low voice.
When we leave & go up that spiral staircase to the main floor, I see Werner’s hat at a table in the window, I know it’s him as he wears that hat in all his photos, I lurch across the bar, fall over the table sending glasses plates knives and forks and bottles flying, Werner jumps up rescuing his glass from getting smashed. I land on my back and look up stupidly from the floor: “My god, you’re Werner Schroeter”—“I was Werner Schroeter,” he says—we somehow got rid of Robbie & went to apt of that actress Annette—the one Magdalena said, “If Annette were sitting here she would have drunk that whole bottle already”—little terrace overlooking the Olympic park, lots of wine. Werner took one shoe off & rubbed his foot through a thin white sock. Couldn’t tell if we would sleep together or not.
That was when people who became important friends—Daniel Schmid, Ingrid, Dieter, Jean-Jacques, Magdalena, Veruschka—came into the picture, all in about 6 months, all unique in the world. Werner generated euphoria if he accepted you & for maybe 5 years we understood each other. Later not so consistently though there was still love & affection despite melancholia. No, I can’t, not yet, if ever.
Robbie is probably 70 now & selling used Mercedes in Bogenhausen. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.
No New York Times. No high-speed Internet. No Desperate Housewives of Atlanta, no American Idol, no Dancing with the Stars, no Kardashians, no Donald Trump, no Tea Party, no NRA, no Rite Aid, no Chase Bank, no Merrill Lynch, no Goldman Sachs.
Of course it’s coming, coming here, coming soon, the gathering tsunami of Our Kind of Capitalism. iPad, iPod, YouTube, Buy It, Love It, Fuck It, Dump It, Buy a New One. The people who sell all this shit say it’s what people want, and they’re not wrong. But if people knew what they were in for, their heads would explode.
“What can stop it?” A Cuban painter asked me at a dinner a few nights ago, looking at a photomontage of Future Havana, plastered with giant advertising billboards and buildings wrapped in corporate logos. Yes, it’s coming. Not yet, but soon.
“I haven’t got any idea. An ecological catastrophe?”
“That is the ecological catastrophe.”
The pingueros at Bim Bom whip out cell phones when there’s a lull in the scramble for tricks. They can’t usually afford to call Miami or Europe, so run their minutes out calling each other while en route to exactly the same place, texting and blabbing. When their minutes have run out, they watch porn loops on their phone screens. The current favorite is an astonishingly large black cock pumping the cunt of a glazed-looking white woman with runny mascara and pink lipstick. She looks completely stoned on heroin. The man growls, in thug-inflected English, “I’m gonna cum, I’m gonna cum, I’m gonna cum, I’m cummin’ now!” He pulls out, splashes jizz on her tits, the scene restarts with no visible splice. The loop is a skanky metaphor for the standard life of a pinguero, minus the dull transitions, which is probably why they stare at it over and over, laughing sardonically, spellbound.
A man at dinner told me he lives on Formentera, but travels incessantly. He can’t stand being in one place. We had that in common. Others at dinner were current New Yorkers originally from Montreal and Australia, and a couple from New York living here off a fortune from junk bonds. They had the hearty, confiding laughter of people engaged in an ongoing criminal enterprise. The New Yorkers from New York came here to take photographs. They have been east, to Trinidad de Cuba. Today they’re driving west, to Pinar del Río. On safari, apparently.
D. disputed my idea that the convertible peso has restored a measure of national self-esteem after the blows of the Special Period and its long aftermath. I said it had to have been demoralizing, in the years of the dollar economy, to use a political enemy’s coin of the realm. D. was impatient. If he sells a painting in Miami, he said, it’s paid for in dollars, but before that turns into usable money here, thirty percent of it goes missing in tax and conversion charges. All right. National self-esteem is a pretty vapid concept at the best of times. Especially at the best of times, come to think of it. When I changed a lump sum for my rent, I lost seventy dollars in the process. I hoped it made somebody feel better. This scam to sock hard currency into the treasury, though, is probably even more shortsighted than the Argentine sleight of hand twenty years ago, that insisted one peso equaled one dollar. It might feel fractionally less slavish to be more desperate for CUCs than dollars, of course, but the real problem part is the desperation.
There was a lot of talk of DSL, the importance of getting it installed throughout the country as soon as possible. I understand that. But the technology is addictive, and humanly wasteful, I believe, out of all proportion to its benefits. It warps the way people think, destroys their attention spans. Corrupts many other, more important things like imagination and creativity. It’s ruined Japan, China, the US, Europe, and Scandanavia. Probably Chile, Brazil, and Argentina, too. It will be tragic when it wrecks Cuba, turning these lovely unhappy people into screen-gazing, antlike, unlovely, happy robots.
The man from Formentera said Formentera is entirely WiFi’d. It could be that the beautiful places will still offer too many tangible physical pleasures for the masturbatory virtual ones of the Internet to replace them. But I remember what happened in Hydra the year that island got TV: all the houses suddenly sported aerials. At night, every living room window filled with a trance-inducing cathode glow. The villagers abandoned outdoor chess and quoit pitching in the dusty evening lanes. They gave up watching the sun dissolve behind the Peloponnese dusk from the harbor cafés. In spitting distance of the wine-dark sea, they stayed in their whitewashed stucco cubes, watching reruns of Matlock.
Of course no Greek peasant or Tuscan shepherd primarily views his domain as glorious and exalting. He’s organically part of it, for him it’s utilitarian, natural in a different way than what a poet or a tourist celebrates as transcendent and “natural.” Still, it takes a lot of social engineering for him to ignore it altogether. After escaping the dinner, I went to the Malecón, where one of my jinetero friends, finishing a pint, tossed the bottle onto the rocks, sighed heavily and said, “Isn’t it beautiful here, with the wind and the ocean?”
The man from Formentera said that while he can’t do everything he’d like to do, he’s okay with just never doing anything he doesn’t want to. I think that’s what many of us half-lucky people finally settle for. It’s hardly catastrophic. Most people spend their entire lives doing things they don’t want to do. And when you take a gander at the world we live in, it looks it.
He said h
e hadn’t planned to live as long as he has. I guessed him to be forty-seven or so. Like me, he has to improvise as he goes along. At my greater age it’s a dicey way to continue, fraught with the chance of sudden impoverishment long before the body gives up the ghost, among other horrors. I expected to be dead by forty, then fifty, then sixty. I don’t wish I were, but after a time, extinction doesn’t hold the same terror that it does at twenty—only the hideous ways that it usually happens, unless you die in your sleep.
Punk rolled into Los Angeles after its peak wave had already broken in New York. At first, we consulted flyers at Licorice Pizza or Chatterton’s Bookshop to catch bands like the Germs and the Deadbeats at Whisky a Go Go or the Palladium, or saw them at loft parties or clubs that opened and closed in one night in derelict warehouses out beyond Union Station. After the Masque opened in a basement off Hollywood Boulevard, Zero Zero and other official punk dives sprang up. Club Lingerie, a venerable R&B spot, came back as a punk venue. Later, cash-strapped Chinese restaurants, Madame Wong’s and Cathay de Grande, turned into music bars that happened to serve egg rolls and chow mein.
I vaguely knew Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers from his early Cockettes days in San Francisco, and sometimes partied with musicians from The Nerves and the Circle Jerks. The bands had a potent negative glamour that drew me into a tireless nomadic audience: people who showed up for anything because there was nothing else at all going on in Los Angeles. The audience was as much the show as the music, raw sound that drilled into the brain and was less important than what the players wore, what they did with their bodies on stage. Everyone competed for the most fucked-up reputation, the most suicidal carelessness with drugs, the most gratuitously hostile behavior. Yet punk musicians and followers I got to know personally were touchingly sweet, highly intelligent, and un-materialistic to a Utopian degree. Damaged in one way or another, but who isn’t?