by Gary Indiana
Later I remembered the PEN panel. Neither of us had any use for PEN, but we were asked to speak to an audience of émigré writers, from what was then the Eastern communist bloc. Kathy, I, and a writer I’ll call Bertie Wooster—a pallid, skinny, freckled beanstalk in Farmer John overalls, in the debutante phase of a monstrous career. He’d kicked it off with an interminable first novel full of insects and adolescent overreach. He later produced a veritable library of longer, fatter books, in series, with now and then a little thing no thicker than a pamphlet, as a sorbet. There was this about Bertie Wooster, or Bertie Wooster’s books: he wasn’t so much a force of nature as a contented slave to graphomania, like Joyce Carol Oates. (Susan once told me that if JCO happened to finish a novel en route to the airport, she turned the last page over and immediately started writing another one.) Bertie Wooster never stopped writing, apparently. Nothing he wrote could possibly interest an adult for longer than ten minutes, yet his books, soon after the PEN panel, became, if not canonical, accepted as naturally occurring ripples in the literary pond, respectfully noted one after another in the New York Review of Books and other places that shaped opinions. He was, I later heard, given a push by Jean Stein.
On the panel, Bertie extolled the unfettered liberty of writers in the West. This surprised us. His then current, surpassingly fat first novel had seemed, in a confused, allegorical way, critical of the capitalist order and its insurmountable contradictions. But then, I had never finished his first novel. Neither had Kathy. Life was too short. Perhaps a volte-face in favor of free markets and Chicago School neoliberalism had been effected in the second chapter. At any rate. There was something of the high school valedictorian about him. He sounded like the spawn of a clapboard colonial in Greenwich, unscrolling an address of uplifting homilies. I’m sure he wasn’t from Greenwich. He looked like a hick.
“It falls to each successive generation to uphold the Jeffersonian ideal—” “As Lincoln said in a time of civil war—” “To quote George Orwell in his magnificent allegory—”
“He’s going to pull an American flag out of his ass and fart ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in a minute,” Kathy predicted in a whisper, eyes huge with incredulity. We were startled by this blather, which frankly seemed more pandering to the PEN club than to the émigré writers. Maybe PEN would give him a merit badge. Kathy and I were not intoxicated by the ever-ringing liberty that involved, at the time, having our books automatically trashed or ignored by the presiding covens at the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and, in Kathy’s case, Vanity Fair. I think we assumed the wildly applauding literary refugees did not understand what Bertie Wooster was saying, or were being polite.
When my turn came, I offered that in spite of the disaster of “really existing socialism,” a Marxist analysis of society remained valid. I mentioned Reagan, his war on unions, the growing chasm between rich and poor. Kathy expressed the idea that Capital isn’t a predictive book, or a Utopian tract, but an epic novel about economic relationships, with industrial machinery and consumer products as the central characters. Naively, we wanted the audience, trained dialecticians all, to know that we knew that America is only as much fun as Disneyland if you happen to own it. We assumed the new arrivals already saw that.
The Eastern Bloc writers were aghast, however. They wanted ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Their hero was Ronald Reagan, friend of thoughtful people everywhere. One apoplectic Hungarian likened us to Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu. The cocktail reception afterwards was thinly cordial. The male writers leered at Kathy’s tits. The PEN people were in puppy heaven. The panel had been “spiked with controversy.” Today, the same Eastern Europeans report their disgust with America in little émigré journals published in Europe. After a couple of decades, it sank in that literature has no importance here whatsoever. Some of them even hint that they miss communism, which is taking things a little far.
Unlike most people I knew, Kathy moved often, restlessly, disappearing from the scene for years at a time, teaching at faraway colleges, living a bit larger on her trust funds elsewhere than she did in Manhattan, where she put on the poor mouth for her “bohemian” friends. At lunch one day, a fifty-dollar bill slid out of her wallet as she rummaged for a single, after an epic soliloquy about her pennilessness. “I must have saved this and forgotten all about it!” Another fifty-dollar bill then dropped from the wallet. She stuffed it back in without comment.
I have no recollection of first meeting her. One day she was a fact of life. We did readings together and commiserated about our disappointments in love. She kept a tidy record of her affairs, and dropped bits of them into her books, along with her phone conversations. Her voice shot up several decibels in public, in restaurants, and often she made plans with me while aiming her voice at other tables, elaborate plans to sail around the Greek islands or launch a magazine or collaborate on a play, plans I knew would be forgotten minutes after we parted company. She was ferociously, insultingly competitive at times. We often feuded. But the gladiator reflex of writers in the mainstream was diluted in our own little skirmishes. Ultimately we were against the same things, and up against the same clubby establishment. We were basically allies, familial in the sense that we scored points against each other in private but defended each other in public.
She wrote too much, I thought. I am generally against producing books like a point spread on a horse race. I probably have the wrong idea, since all these books go out of print eventually, and the more there are, the better one’s chances of accidental rediscovery—though as a motive, I think, that one isn’t very compelling.
I am reading Simenon’s The Little Man from Archangel for the third or fourth time. A deft and wondrous novel. Simenon knew how good it was, among his many good novels. When Camus won the Nobel Prize for L’Étranger published the same year, Simenon said, “What, they give it to that little turd?”
It’s useless to look for books in English here, but a drag to pack more than a handful, since any suitcase quadruples the weight of any book placed inside it. I brought Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood. Two of Roni Horn’s Iceland books. Au Bonheur des Dames by Zola. The Age of Napoleon by Alistair Horne, a conservative historian as it turns out, but so what. A slim book of Tomas Tranströmer poems. And The Idiot, a novel I read at least once a year.
A few days ago I discovered a university bookshop at the far end of Barrio Chino. Dismal and poorly lit and industrial-looking, the usual moth-eaten propaganda, books of Fidel’s and Che Guevara’s speeches, volumes of Marxist economic theory, with a few readable things mixed in. I bought a Spanish translation of Sebald’s Vertigo—not without difficulty, I had only a twenty-peso CUC, and a rudely vexed clerk had to hunt resentfully for change, in the register, in the back room, in a paper bag under the counter. She finally left the store altogether and walked two blocks down Dragones Street to a mercado to break the bill. It’s a diurnal problem to break anything larger than a five-peso note into smaller notes and coins.
I try to get my larger bills broken down as early in the day as possible. It often proves unfeasible to buy anything within a ten-block radius of anywhere, as nobody has change, since nobody has money. You buy things you don’t want to reduce the amount of change the vendor has to give you, or go without whatever it is you do want. The banks on La Rampa and the cambio at the Nacional Hotel run out of small money as quickly as taxis, restaurants, open-air markets, and cinemas do. This city runs on pocket change. No one in New York thinks of change as money anymore. If a cab driver owes you six-fifty after getting a generous tip, he’ll give you back six and make unhappy noises if you insist on getting the fifty cents. Money itself becomes waste in a society built on waste production.
Finding Sebald was flukish. Foreign books that turn up in Havana have the peculiarity of tidewash. On the shelves of a sidewalk kiosk near the Capitolio, I found a biography of Elizabeth Smart—in Cuba, I’m sure, known only to me and whoever left this biography where someone else snatched i
t up and traded it for a couple cigarettes, as the author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Books in English are rare and usually garbage. People charge ridiculous prices for them. Around the Plaza de Armas, some of the booksellers specialize in thrillers and spy novels that tourists read on incoming flights and abandon in hotel rooms, which have all been through the mill, sporting ripped covers and pages falling out. Some were evidently dropped in bath water and put out in the sun to dry. They charge as much as sixteen CUC for a shitty Jack Higgins novel.
In the bookshop across from the Hotel Colina, an unlikely find: Thomas Bernhard’s Obras, looking forlorn between a stack of economic textbooks and two late, bad novels of John Dos Passos. I don’t think I want to read Bernhard in Spanish. (Weird randomness of English printed matter isn’t unique to Cuba; in La Paz, a bookstore near the witches’ market had two ancient paperbacks of Philip K. Dick novels and multiple copies of Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, representing the full gamut of North American literature.)
Mastiu has moved back to Santiago. His job was a seasonal thing, and the season’s over. He left an indecipherable address on a scrap of paper. I doubt if I’ll see him again anytime soon, if ever. It leaves a hole in the day, but not as large a hole as I’d expected.
I thought of Los Angeles later as a city of false starts, first paragraphs, broken-off beginnings of things that never proceeded. I was too mired in private conflicts and contradictory wishes and the static narrative of “I, me, and more me” for a description of my world to sound different than any teenager’s locked diary.
I tried to write a novel, the details of which I’ve long forgotten. It bogged down after ten, twenty, thirty pages—fifty seemed the magic number at which the most promising plots and characters refused to develop further.
I showed chapters of this ever-repeating project to Elena’s boyfriend, a heart surgeon at Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital who had a contract for a “Michael Crichton-type” medical thriller. (All of this later proved to be fictitious, including the heart surgeon part. He really was a doctor, though.) Bill was, or pretended to be, the nicer sort of Southern good ol’ boy, as corpulent and watery-eyed as a gruff but kind-hearted Mississippi lawman, with a drawling, croaking baritone that made even dumb remarks sound richly considered and ironic. He did a fair deal of huffing, ruminating, and swabbing his glasses with his shirttails before allowing that I was “on the raaht traack.” I wasn’t, really, but I was grateful for any encouragement.
“See, what you have heah, is the beginnin’ of a vary lihvley comin’-a-age bill-dungs romahn. I’m sortah shootin’ for moah a best-sellin’ suspense fiction narrative along the lines a Comah. You know what yuh really ought to whrite about is that … seamy homasesual world yoah livin’ in.”
I felt barely in the world at all, as the world of other people was fractured into drastically different quadrants: the punks I knew from the clubs, the middle-class lawyers and their families and friends I knew from work, and the gays in the pickup bars. I wasn’t truly close to anybody, even Dane. I spent an absurd amount of time alone, in the car, driving nowhere in particular, driving because being on the road felt less horrifying than sitting alone in a room.
I often found myself driving on an unpaved access road that slithered along ridges hemmed with pines and juniper bushes to a flat, dusty plateau right below the observatory on Mount Lee. There was an outcrop of jagged travertine with caves woven through it. Sometimes I walked around in the caves, through puddles of bat guano, wary of rattlesnakes. Around a bend in the road, the reverse side of the Hollywood sign came into view, the letters, held up on charred diagonal pylons, a bricolage of white-painted metal sheets pocked with bullet holes. The ledge the sign perched on revealed a startling panorama, the city spread out below like an endless construction site sprinkled with talcum powder.
The sign had seen better days. Arsonists and kids with guns had attacked it. The scabby ground was strewn with used condoms and smashed beer bottles. The melancholy decrepitude suggested a moonscape in daylight, painted by Caspar David Friedrich in collaboration with Walt Disney. I dragged one of the scrunched, shot-off panels to my car and jammed it into my car trunk.
Installed in my bedroom at the Bryson, the battered metal resembled a John Chamberlain sculpture with a Cy Twombly painting scratched into its facing. The people who came to my apartment were not the type to have those references, and probably wondered if I was as geeky as this pointless acquisition seemed to indicate.
“Did you realize all those letters are actually full of holes?” I would ask them excitedly. “They look all solid white and shiny from a distance, but they’re really not.”
None of my guests found this intriguing, or my possession of something blown off a giant letter O with a shotgun remarkable. After a few weeks I didn’t find it remarkable either, but getting rid of it would have been more trouble than keeping it around.
I continued writing my changeling novel, recording the flatline uneventfulness of my days, in an over-salted, mawkishly sad, alphabetic monotone, as if awaiting deliverance from purgatory. Periodically, I tore it up and started over from scratch. Since I had no idea how to publish anything and didn’t believe the books I started were “real writing,” this felt like a private struggle to understand why I had ended up on a hamster wheel of wage slavery and drunken sexual abandon. I often sensed that I’d gone beyond rescue and ruined the future, that my grasp of reality was probably even more defective than that of my parents, secure in their provincial New Hampshire microcosm.
I had the sense of always standing a little apart from the narrative, of missing the point, of nothing ever being quite enough or never adding up. Life was a choppy sequence of episodes and images unfolding in several worlds whose only connection was the fact that I slipped into one after another like an actor performing several plays in the same twenty-four-hour span.
The Bryson apartment filled up with books, stacks of books creeping up the walls, books on the china cabinet shelves, books piled on tables and stuffed in closets. I had hundreds more books than I could ever read, the majority shoplifted from Chatterton’s, a bookstore on Vermont Avenue that had the performance space of a theater company in back.
I developed a crush on a married clerk at Chatterton’s named Don, an actor in the theater company, whose rimless glasses, chipped front tooth, and wild hair made him look like a sexy space alien. In fact, he later played a space alien, in a series of moderately successful, low-budget science fiction films. I pursued him with the recklessness peculiar to the young and clueless. I wrote him love letters. I mooned around the store when he was working. He accepted these letters with a flirtatious amusement but never indicated any reciprocity of feeling. He liked the attention. The bookstore was the hub of a small band of literary types where nothing went unnoticed, and this low-burning erotic flame was soon noticed by everybody, and became another desultory gossip item. After I realized how public it all was, my infatuation became “ironic,” a swooning joke: love is embarrassing. The adoring letters began to read like parodies of adoring letters, intended not only for his eyes but his wife’s, his co-workers’, even random customers. There was something ugly about all this, as if I were turning myself inside out and exposing my guts as a form of stand-up comedy.
At Chatterton’s, too, I made friends with Mary Power, who worked the register on certain weekdays, and Vilma, her girlfriend, who managed the Los Feliz, a Laemmle theater, a few steps north on Vermont Avenue. Mary was a serious, soft-spoken, strong-chinned Irish woman with an uncanny gift of mimicry that she unleashed at dinner after many drinks. Vilma was short and pinch-faced, no beauty, but somehow a woman of laconic mystery, severe, occasionally volatile, defensively secretive. There were parties where most of the bookstore employees swanned around each other’s apartments and backyard gardens, a pizza joint across Vermont where they gathered on Friday nights, a strip-mall bar on Hillhurst where everyone drank too much. Members of the Chatterton set
were forever on the verge of starting or finishing a play, a novel, closing a screenplay deal, moving away to open a secondhand bookshop in Michigan, or to grow perfect weed in Humboldt County. On the face of it, however, nobody was in any hurry to do anything, even the clerks approaching middle age.
Mary encouraged me to continue stalking Don in my desultory fashion. She couldn’t stand him. Behind my back, she berated him for leading me on and breaking my young heart. It sounds ridiculous now, but his sexual indifference embarrassed me for years after this whole period was finished, as a high point of humiliation. It was a purely willful, physical attraction, but I had fastened on Don as the person I wanted to love me back, imagining my desire could make this person I didn’t really know into the person I wanted him to be. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the man himself was actually much less interesting than the space alien he one day incarnated, and, for that matter, less interesting than the man I was actually sleeping with. An unlimited obtusity governed my relationships with all sorts of people, particularly “romantic” manias that never found an appropriate object. Dane was easy, available for sex, and even, in his less-than-impressive way, devoted to me. Yet for that reason, I didn’t place much importance on the real relationship we had, and invested my emotions in one that I didn’t have.
Mary managed a Laemmle theater in Westwood at night, the Westland Twins, and offered me a moonlighting job selling tickets and running the concession stand. It was an indisputable reason to avoid working overtime at night in Watts—which, drugs or no drugs, had turned really scary with a slew of drive-by homicides a few blocks from the office—and promised to fill even more time with routine, away from the depressed solitude of my apartment. My writing wasn’t really getting anywhere. I didn’t think it ever would. I supposed I would have to make some miserable compromise with reality in the near future. I’d go back to university and finish my degree, then become something unimportant and standardized in academia. Since I couldn’t bear thinking about that, I figured the theater job, which ran till eleven p.m., would leave exactly enough free time to reach West Hollywood by midnight, have a few drinks, pick up a trick, get fucked, and fall asleep by three or four a.m. Except for drive time, there wouldn’t be a single minute in there to think about anything.