I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  I’ve never worn a watch in my life. I felt an unfamiliar need today to know what time it is. The watches were all overpriced, mostly broken.

  I drank a coffee at a place on O’Reilly Street. They used to serve simple fried chicken there, with crispy skin. That’s been substituted by a chicken cutlet seared in a grid of unappetizing cubes. It tasted like pencil shavings. Chicken is the only thing you get to eat in Cuba, chicken and pork. In Pinar del Río or Las Tunas you might get a piece of fish. People in other places never believe how gross the food is when I tell them. They have a fantasy of food in the Caribbean tropics inspired by Carmen Miranda’s headgear. If you find a single spot in Havana serving a single dish half as good as the same thing served in Ecuador, chances are you will eat there daily instead of risking what you might find on your plate in the place next door.

  In my opinion, so-called Caribbean cuisine is vile on all the islands, but Cuba is the standout of mare nostrum. (I suppose people who go to St. Barts fly their food in from France, but anyone who’d want to be on the same island with those people has to be insane.) Cuban food is so memorably hideous that you can tell if some bullshit person has ever actually been here by getting them to talk about the food.

  A few nights ago, an Argentine friend, contemplating the squalid profusion of hustlers gathered along the Malecón, came up with an enticing tourist pitch: “You’ll come for the prostitutes, but you’ll stay for the food.” I was counting on this restaurant’s chicken, and it betrayed me.

  I reconsidered buying a gift watch. Maybe a pricey, pre–Revolution Cuba pocket watch. That way I could tell time here, and have a present to give later. The watches rested on squares of navy felt beside an array of Camilo Cienfuegos lapel pins and novelty items from the 1940s.

  The man selling watches pesters me. He thinks he’s a mind reader. These vendors would sell more if they left the customers alone instead of trying to guess what they’re looking for. How would I know what I’m looking for until I find something I want in this flea market mess? But the sellers here love to put me in a stranglehold of boredom. They try for sweet, but come off overbearing and tiresome. Plus their pushiness—in Istanbul at the Grand Bazaar, merchants are in your face too, but on them it’s mercenary exuberance; here it looks pathetically like desperation. They’ve trained themselves on tourists, who are stupid by nature and fascinated by any shiny object waved in front of them. So the vendors presume stupidity in everyone, and have lost any radar for the non-stupid. On top of that, most of them are quite stupid themselves.

  A tiny Coca-Cola crate, its little grid filled with teeny milky-green bottles. Beside that, sad bracelet charms, a Bakelite binocular viewer, and a box of slides that don’t fit into the viewer. Held up to the sun they reveal views of Egyptian pyramids and other Wonders of the World, in soft rotogravure colors: Angel Falls, Great Wall of China, Porcelain Tower of Nanjing.

  Puckered National Geographics from the 1930s. Copies of Life with scarred covers of Cardinal Mindszenty, quintuplets, Amelia Earhart, General Eisenhower. On another table, betting chips in a plastic slide caddy: a few from old Mafia casinos in Havana, others from Deauville and Las Vegas. On two chips, a swastika incised at the center winks luridly, like the bad uncle who suddenly sticks his hands down your pants.

  The chip owner surveys his wares with the shrewd boredom of a diamond dealer whose merchandise will always find a buyer and never take a stock dive, sitting spread out like a sack of sawdust in a canvas chair, smoking a Cohiba cigar. He’s aloof. Can’t be bothered. Customers try his patience. When he thinks of it he scratches the ear of a mangy, pregnant dog. It looks like he’s recently eaten something preferable to chicken.

  “¿Cuanto es?”

  “Those? Those are very expensive.”

  They are. Sixty CUCs per chip. Slightly less than seventy dollars. I guess it’s worth it, but I haven’t got it. I do, really, but it’s too frivolous to pay seventy dollars for one poker chip. Even one with a swastika on it. Funny that Nazi memorabilia is as prized in the worker’s paradise as anywhere else.

  Céline missed this detail in his fin-de-guerre trilogy: casino chips of the Third Reich. How did they get here? But wait, what am I thinking? He describes the casino in the Hotel Simplon in Baden-Baden in North, July 1944, the same passage I read in John Boskovich’s film twelve or thirteen years ago: “the dexterity of luck!… harmonious unbroken movements, chips … flawless delivery!… the tradition of the Baden Casino doesn’t date from yesterday!… Berlioz played there and Liszt … and all the Romanov princes … the Naritzkins and Savoys … the Bourbons and Braganças …” I walk into the park behind the lined-up felt tables and propped-open display cases and fish out my notebook, and start outlining an “adventures of a penny” story, describing the travels of a Nazi poker chip from a punter’s breast pocket in Baden-Baden in 1944 to a roulette table at Meyer Lansky’s Riviera in the last days of Batista. But the pencil starts to drag me back to California, having a lazy will of its own.

  That was years after anyone holding that poker chip would have cashed out on a permanent basis. I wonder what’s underneath what I recall. Secrets? Wishes? Longings? Wishes, longings: so simpler to remember than whatever I thought I was doing.

  I must have told myself comforting things to account for the fear and inertia I experienced interchangeably. Fear of being nothing, of being damaged beyond repair, fear of being remembered only by people I wanted to forget. In the car. On the freeway. In a bar. Wasting eons of irrecoverable time.

  I must have pretended life was a novel or a movie I was narrating as it went along, as if I had control of it and decided what direction it took. I see now that at the time I’ve been writing about, there was no coherent point to me at all.

  Leaving the park this afternoon I suddenly felt sick of Havana. I stayed in a black mood until the sun went and night settled over everything. Sick of clouds and the sky and the sea and the rest of it. I came back to the apartment. I tried to read a Spanish edition of Othello I bought in the Plaza de Armas. I went out again to feed the cats.

  The Westland Twins provided a limited but exciting view of Hollywood glamour and money. We showcased a specific grade of “foreign” movie: European, with subtitles, a notch or two below the artistic level of Fassbinder, Buñuel, Godard, or Pasolini. Probably the only first-class films we ran were edgy melodramas by Claude Chabrol. The better movies played at the Los Feliz in Los Feliz, the Pico in West Hollywood, and the Nuart in Santa Monica. Our offerings were undemandingly arty, slightly pretentious, domestic farces or dramas of middle-class marriage gone awry, or Italian sex comedies of the frou-frou type that featured the Antonioni-less Monica Vitti.

  A typical night began with Mary stocking the cash drawer and organizing receipts from the matinee shift. A buxom, giddy queen named Kevin and I filled the fake butter dispenser and then replenished the soda spigots. The cloying odors of stale candy and artificial butter were nauseating, but somehow stimulating too. In its own absurd way, working in a movie house wasn’t entirely unlike being in a movie or on stage as an extra.

  Mary was forever on the phone with Max Laemmle, scion of the Laemmle empire, nephew of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Studios. Carl Laemmle’s latter days as CEO had been marked by his habit of attending board meetings carrying a piss bucket, owing to a failing bladder. Max himself was now completely gaga. He spent his days placing frantic calls to his various theaters in a state of dementia. On one occasion he demanded to know where Vilma was.

  “She’s right there in the office, with you,” Mary told him.

  “This woman with black hair?”

  “Yes, that’s Vilma.”

  “Then where is Mary?”

  “I’m Mary.”

  “Well, Mary, I’m hanging up, if you hear from Vilma tell her to call me.”

  “Max is such a character,” Mary always said when she got off the phone.

  A bit later, Sam, our projectionist, sauntered in through the service door and grabbed a
few snacks from the shelves, then disappeared into his booth. Sam, a blandly good-looking, tall, gangly Texan, was the object of Kevin’s predatory lust. At the theater, Kevin killed a lot of downtime by scheming to get Sam loaded after work.

  “I don’t care if he pretends afterward it never happened, I’m gonna rim that delicious asshole if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Whenever Sam came out of the booth to use the rest room, Kevin immediately had to pee. “His cock is the size of a donkey’s,” he reported on several occasions. “Really. It’s as big as the Ritz. Like Porfirio Rubirosa!”

  Having studied Sam closely myself, I thought this was probably true.

  “And he wants it,” Kevin added. That sounded less plausible. I could often recognize my pathology in other people while remaining blind to my own.

  The theater drew audiences from Bel Air, Brentwood, and other fabulously rich neighborhoods. Westwood was an easy drive for them. “The rustle of money” is no idle phrase. Our customers, any one of whom had more money than twenty blocks of Watts would cost, were somehow effortlessly misted in wealth. It exuded from their pores. Their clothes looked ineffably finer, more vivid, better fitted, somehow cleaner than ordinary people’s clothes. Their hairstyles looked engraved, hair by individual hair, into archetypal hairstyles worthy of museum mannequins. They wore the subtlest jewelry, string-thin platinum bracelets, teardrop opal earrings, demure-looking diamond rings, and you knew the stones were worth as much as the building they were standing in.

  This never stopped the clientele from complaining about the price of Twizzlers or a cup of Sprite, which hardly cost anything.

  “A bag of M&Ms never used to be seventy-five cents,” some face-lifted hag in a ranch mink would opine, in an access of longing for an earlier, more gracious era when M&Ms had cost fifty cents.

  Notable figures graced our lobby. Anjelica Huston. Tony Perkins. I sometimes asked for their autographs on dispenser napkins, then took somewhat childish pleasure in using the napkins to mop up Coke spills. The only customer who ever acted like a prick about giving an autograph wasn’t even a big star—Graham Jarvis, who had played Charlie Haggers on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, seemed to view being recognized as a criminal importunity.

  I was barely noticed by the customers. I may have been cute enough to be considered fuckable earlier in the day, but I arrived at the theater wilted-looking from my Watts job, and in any case, people don’t really register anybody selling them popcorn in a movie theater. Two customers who did go out of their way to be personable were Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. They acted like teenagers in love, always made friendly conversation, and were generous with tips. (No reputable business, in those days, featured a tip jar. “RJ” would, however, slide a dollar bill across the counter, and wink.)

  Three nights a week, the freeway system became an umbilicus between the shittiest ghetto in America and the country’s richest suburb. The surreal contrast between the two places formed my entire world view, which hasn’t altered much since.

  Stefan—please come to hotel at 6-6:30 Alabin 67 off Vitosha Blvd please do not fuck anybody else this afternoon I want you to write yr name in cum on my face w yr cock (not yr patronymic just yr first name)

  Sent from iPhone, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013

  thirteen

  The ghost of Ernest Hemingway would like to haunt the isle of Cuba. In Miramar there is the Hemingway Marina. Several bars and hotels in Habana Vieja display portraits of Hemingway in various heroic poses on their walls. A famous Hemingway daiquiri is served in many places. The flea market stalls in the Parque Cespedes have sold disintegrating paperbacks of Adiós a las Armas and El Viejo y el Mar, and sometimes books by Hemingway in English, in all the years I have come here.

  Most Cubans have never read Hemingway and never will. In fact most Cubans have no idea who Hemingway was, and only recognize the name as that of the marina, or, in some cases, the famous daiquiri. The myth of Ernest Hemingway as a Cuban national idol has not enjoyed much traction since the 1960s, when Hemingway and Fidel Castro were often photographed together, smoking cigars or sharing a comradely embrace.

  Now that Norman Mailer has joined the shades of ancient evenings, the only American writer who still carries a torch for Ernest Hemingway is Joan Didion, upon whom the influence of Hemingway has not been entirely wonderful. The irksome repetitions and overly precious one-line paragraphs in Didion come directly out of Hemingway and the pregnant white space he famously left around his sentences. The tough, laconic, manly men who serve as fantasy heroes in Didion’s fiction have the unmistakable Hemingway touch. So do the shrieking pansies and suicidal homos she scatters through her books for spice, like pineapple rings on a Christmas ham. If Didion did not have the mind of a steel trap up her sleeve, she would be Ernest Hemingway, much to the detriment of American letters.

  Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe are often thought of in the same breath, so to speak. They reached their zenith of celebrity and committed suicide around the same time. They embodied certain fantasies and gender stereotypes rampant in the 1950s. Yet we still love Marilyn, whose genius on the screen is there to see, and her sad private story continues to move us, even when recounted by a twaddle factory in Princeton, New Jersey. Hemingway we love considerably less. His genius on the page seems ever more indiscernible, as he moves ever closer to the realm of antiquary curiosity where Fannie Hurst and thousands of Hula-Hoops have gathered dust for half a century.

  How did it happen? Why, why, why did the creator of Lady Brett Ashley and Jake with the missing testicle sink so precipitously in our regard? Hemingway is a lousy writer. A phony writer. A writer whose books are a tissue of falsehoods and moronic clichés of masculinity. A mendacious, ridiculous, deluded buffoon of a writer intoxicated by fame to the point of writing drivel. A malicious, unscrupulous, pig-headed bully who stole any good idea he ever had from his betters and turned those ideas into banalities. A Harlequin romance novelist masquerading as a pioneer of literary modernism.

  But none of that has ever tarnished the esteem enjoyed by other male, heterosexual, American writers of Hemingway’s vintage or Hemingway’s sensibility in such a dramatic way. F. Scott Fitzgerald may not have been as big a prick as Hemingway (literally, if Hemingway himself can be believed, and he can’t), but his books are even worse than Hemingway’s, including The Great Gatsby, which is often mistaken for a great novel because it can be read in a few hours and its characters are rich people who come to a bad end. Even Charles Bukowski hasn’t yet diminished in his influence, and his books are—there is no polite way of saying it—shit. As for today’s standard-bearers of normal love and the arduous quest involved in becoming a man, they are but pale suburban worms beside the behemoth of snowy Kilimanjaro.

  Perhaps it’s because time has peeled away the testosterone facial mask of this endlessly posturing, preening, pathetic cheerleader of the bullring and killer of elephants and tigers, revealing a callow sissy whom his transgendered son didn’t hesitate to address as “her.” Perhaps it’s because white space so readily suggests an absence of mental activity instead of a plenum of immanent meaning. Perhaps it’s simply the fact that daiquiris have gone out of fashion.

  But before we dump his collected writings into the marina with which he is so often confused, bidding good riddance to once-sacred rubbish, and forget about Hemingway altogether, let’s remember that Hemingway left a sizeable chunk of his fortune to his many cats and their successive offspring, who still enjoy a life of feline luxury in Florida. So Papa wasn’t all bad after all.

  NO, a punk zine, sent me to interview David Lynch, who had debuted his now-classic film Eraserhead at Filmex. We met at Tiny Naylor’s on Sunset. Expecting a brain-fried freak with pitted skin and rotten teeth after watching the ingeniously gross Eraserhead, I prepared for this meeting by bleaching my hair white and spraying it orange, piercing my left nostril with a safety pin, and dressing like an escapee from a locked ward.

  David Lynch turned out to be freak
y in a completely different way than I anticipated. Nattily blazered and coiffed, his baby-smooth face as peppy and bland as a Rotary Club, he bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Potatohead. His large teeth gleamed. His hair, the color of wet straw, was worked into the high-crested ’50s do favored by Troy Donahue or the now-forgotten Fabian Forte.

  He talked about Eraserhead and himself with extreme single-mindedness. Without being asked, he declared that he had never ingested a drug or smoked a cigarette, and eschewed all stimulants, including coffee. He ordered a repulsive herbal beverage called Postum and stared reprovingly at my coffee cup as if it contained cyanide.

  I had been fascinated by his hilarious film. But his enthusiasm about it was not infectious. He seemed spellbound by his own accomplishment, and had already decided what he was going to say about it. He had, he told me, formerly lived in Philadelphia. Living in Philadelphia had instilled in him such fear and dread that he might have been speaking of Auschwitz. He never explained why Philadelphia had so traumatized him. He seemed to imply that he’d lived in some grueling, impoverished, decrepit industrial hell like the setting of Eraserhead. This seemed doubtful to me: David Lynch had the inbred assurance of an upper-middle-class Eagle Scout, a wide-eyed, impervious optimism that only needed a dusting of freckles and a few amphetamines to turn him into Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.