White Girls

by Hilton Als

  WHITE GIRLS

  ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR:

  The Women

  SAN FRANCISCO

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  Copyright © 2013 Hilton Als

  Some of this work appeared in different form in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Artforum, Studio Magazine, Grand Street, the Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and the collection Malcolm X: In Our Own Image.

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.

  ISBN: 978-1-940450-06-3

  CONTENTS

  Tristes Tropiques

  The Women

  This Lonesome Place

  GWTW

  Philosopher or Dog?

  White Noise

  Michael

  The Only One

  I Am the Happiness of This World

  Buddy Ebsen

  A Pryor Love

  You and Whose Army?

  It Will Soon Be Here

  One evening an actor asked me to write

  a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly

  is a black? First of all, what’s his color?

  —Jean Genet

  I know these girls they don’t like me

  But I am just like them.

  —The Roches, “The Married Men”

  TRISTES TROPIQUES

  SIR OR LADY (as I shall call him) sits on the promontory in our village, deep in movie love. He’s running the same old flick in his head again. In it, the stars kiss breathlessly, in true love. This is the kind of movie he enjoys: the movie guy kisses the movie girl and they are one. I listen to Sir or Lady detailing this or that movie scenario and look for myself in every word of it. I don’t want to exist much outside his thinking and regard. I’m convinced Sir or Lady’s movie tales are his way of telling me he and I are one; he’s a romantic, but a silent one. He says: The movie girl overcomes her resistance to the movie guy and then we know they are in love forever. (He’s never told me this part of the story before. He’s never used that exact sequence of words before.) Who is the “we” Sir or Lady is referring to? And what do they “know”? I’m off his screen, apparently. When I can’t find myself in what Sir or Lady says, the world as I know it is nearly washed away by wave after wave of ocean-gray fear: how can he have a thought, a feeling, without me? How can I be a we without him?

  The truth is, I have not been myself lately, and for a long time. In the three decades or more since Sir or Lady—or SL—and I have been friends, I have felt myself becoming him, to a certain extent. I’ve adopted his vocal intonations, his vegetarianism, and his candor. He is my second but longer-running we. This did not come about without its share of relationship noise. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to apprehend—in the blind, awkward, and ultimately solipsistic way many of us strive to articulate why the beloved has become just that—how SL came to fill my mind like no one else on earth.

  Metaphors sustain us. For some time before we were known as an “Oh, you two!” I felt SL was my corny and ancient “other half.” Nearly from the first I wanted to “grow into one” with him, as Aristophanes sort of has it in Plato’s Symposium. We are not lovers. It’s almost as if I dreamed him—my lovely twin, the same as me, only different. I cling to that story in The Symposium, of the two halves coming together in “an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight,” because that’s all I want to know. Like most people, I respond to stories that tell me something about who I am or wish to be, but as reflected in another character’s eyes. With it all, though, I know I will lose sight of SL eventually. I have before. To the movies and movie kissing. To his love of women. To his interest—unlike me—in the plural aspects and manifestations of the world, from its vastness to its multitude of worms. To his politics. To his various subjects (he is a photographer and a filmmaker). To his migraines. To his social drinking. To his lack of interest—unlike me—in delineating who we are. To his lack of interest in speaking of our friendship—our twinship—to anyone at all. To his lack of interest—unlike me—in seeking anyone’s validation for what he thinks or feels.

  Nothing accounts for me and SL getting together, and everything does. Our respective biographies and hence personalities don’t add up to us being a we. We were raised in different parts of the world, in different kinds of families. But we shared this: we each had a daddy, and that can send you packing, even from yourself. Still, SL and I met at a moment when we’d relaxed into that particular conundrum; it was just part of who we were. By the time we met we were anxious to share our black American maleness with another person who knew how flat and not descriptive those words were since they did not include how it had more than its share of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker in it, women who passed their “white girlhood” together. We were also the first line of Joni Mitchell’s autobiography: “I was the only black man in the room.” We were also the the gorgeously corny complications one finds in Joni’s 1976 song, “Black Crow”: “There’s a crow flying / black and ragged / tree to tree. / He’s as black as the highway that’s leading me. / Now he’s diving down / to pick up on something shiny. / I feel like that black crow / flying / in a blue sky.” We were Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly, and their feminism and socialism, and we understood every word of what Barbara meant when she and her co-editors titled their 1982 anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. We were the amused “sickness,” that Eldridge Cleaver felt existed between white women and black men and he said so in his 1968 memoir, Soul on Ice. Our bodies could never forget how Louis Gossett’s character goes mad in the 1970 film The Landlord upon discovering that his wife has taken the white title character as a lover: “Christ has never known the horror of nappy hair in America.” In our lives we had been, variously, the landlord, Louis Gossett, and his wife. We were equal parts “butch realness” and “femme realness,” as delineated in Jennie Livingston’s essential 1990 film Paris Is Burning. We were every word of “Racism: The Sexism of the Family of Man” in Shulamith Firestone’s seminal 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, except when she said: “Just as the child begins with a bond of sympathy with the mother, and is soon required to transfer his identification from the mother to the father, thus to eradicate the female in himself, so too the black male, in order to ‘be a man,’ must untie himself from his bond with the white female, relating to her if at all in a degrading way.” Part of our shared tragedy—we recognized it at once—was that we never separated from our mothers, which meant we liked girls more than the world liked them, which is to say more than they liked each other, let alone themselves. We were the twin boys—one dead, one not dead—in Thomas Tryon’s fantastic 1971 novel The Other. We were, in short, colored male Americans, a not easily categorizable quantity that annoyed most of our countrymen, black and white, male and female alike, since America is nothing if not about categories. But despite the perplexity of the outside world we could not give the other up. Having finally found someone who spoke the other’s language, we could name who we were, which was rare enough indeed, given the history others like us—fellow spectator bait—had with being named incorrectly, or not at all. But what galled our audience, really, is the fact that our friendship grew out of wanting to interest each other. We wanted the world to have no part in it.

  SL had been a we before he met me. He says: What else is there but other people? He’s taken his share of his previous other halves to the movies. There’s hope at the movies. (As an army brat and an only child, SL moved with his parents a lot; movie palaces
were the only homes he recognized as such.) While sitting in a movie theater on one of our first dates, I stole glimpses of SL in the dark. He’s a lovely shade of brown. The silvery movie light and dark made him look more colored. I loved his profile, his long strong neck and perfect posture. He looked as authoritative as someone you might call Sir, and as beautiful and poised as someone you might call Lady. Watching him watch a movie, I noticed how his eyes would open and close slowly, like the folds in an accordion. The movies filled his eyes up.

  Some movies and stars and scenes in movies we saw and loved on our first nights out together: the two actresses who look alike in the opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona. David Bowie and Candy Clark drawing our attention to how much they resemble one another in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth. Sissy Spacek as Pinky Rose and Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux in Robert Altman’s brilliant 1977 movie, 3 Women. In it, the two stars work as physical therapists, along with a set of blond twins. Driving in a car one dusty afternoon, Pinky asks: “I wonder what it’s like to be twins?” Then, continuing: “Bet it’d be weird. You think they know which one they are?”

  Millie: Sure they do. They’d have to, wouldn’t they?

  Pinky: I don’t know. Maybe they’d switch back and forth. You know, one day, Peggy’s Polly, the other day Polly’s Peggy.

  Pinky pauses. She smiles a small mysterious smile before saying:

  Pinky: Who knows? Maybe they’re the same all the time.

  To SL, I was always Pinky. I don’t know, I’ve never asked him, but maybe he knew that, like Pinky, I longed to be his other half long before I found him.

  We met in 1982—I was twenty-two, he’s seven years older—and the only time I effectively left our twinship for a time was in 1992. That year my beloved K died from AIDS. He was diagnosed in 1990, and I spent 1990, 1991, and 1992 in a kind of couple daze. I’d look on as old men walked down city streets arm in arm with their wives. I would watch babies resting on their mothers’ bellies in patches of grass and sunlight in Central Park. I would watch cigarette-smoking teenagers glittering with meanness and youth, whispering and laughing as they shopped on lower Broadway. These exchanges of intimacy were all the same to me because they excluded me, that twin who somehow lost his better half. I was an I, an opera of feeling with a very small audience, a writer of articles about culture but with no real voice, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, a dream of love growing ever more expansive because it was impossible, especially in the gay bars I sometimes frequented in Manhattan, where AIDS loved everyone up the wrong way, or in a way some people weren’t surprised by, particularly those gay men who were too indifferent to be sad—in any case night sweats were a part of the conversation people weren’t having in those bars, in any case, taking your closest friend in because he was shunned by his family was part of the conversation people weren’t having, still, there was this to contend with: that friend’s shirt collars getting bigger; still, there was this to contend with: his coughing and wheezing in the little room off your bedroom in Brooklyn because TB was catching, your friends didn’t want you to catch it, loving a man was catching, your friends didn’t want you to get it; his skin was thin as onionskin, there was a lesion, he couldn’t control his shit, not to mention the grief in his eyes, you didn’t want to catch that; those blue eyes filled with why? Causing one’s sphincter to contract, your heart to look away, a child’s question you couldn’t answer, what happened to our plans, why was the future happening so fast? You didn’t want to catch that, nor the bitterness of the sufferer’s family after the death, nor the friends competing for a bigger slice of the death pie after the sufferer’s death, you certainly didn’t want to catch what it left: night sweats, but in your head, and all day, the running to a pay phone to share a joke, but that number’s disconnected, your body forgets, or rushes toward the love you remember, but it’s too late, he’s closer to the earth now than you are, and you certainly don’t want to catch any of that. So. You search, like some latter-day Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, for your “we of me,” but at a distance. Your we could be dying, but so filled with love, all those couples in the park, dancers in the street, unlike you, so resentful of the romantic strain love engenders, the pulverizingly tedious self-absorption loss wraps you in: I was subjected to that. This is what it meant to me. The ego—what a racket. And what of the person who actually disintegrated, and the imprint of his sad eyes and rotten luck in your living atmosphere of air and buildings? He has only you to go by now. To stay awake to the memory of his toes, and small buttocks in those jeans, the sound of his heels on the floor, and what it sounded like when he said “we,” as you lay in bed holding his dying in your now relatively well-ordered world of health and well-being.

  Even though SL and I talked on a more or less daily basis from 1989 on, there were certain things I was never entirely comfortable discussing with him, such as AIDS, and my queerness. By the time I met him, I was so used to being on my own in the latter, and felt so alone in the former, that, even after my beloved K died, in 1992, I had no real language for that part of my life that dick transcended, and degraded.

  I met K in 1981, in New York; we were students at the same college. He had the straightest back and longest neck—just like SL. Even though he was straight off the boat from Connecticut when we met and he resembled, then, a young Montgomery Clift—he looked like an older Montgomery Clift when he was dying—K’s demeanor was as disciplined and colored as SL’s, which is to say K’s affect was not too far removed from how Flannery O’Connor might have described someone like SL when she wrote: “[The Negro] is a man of very elaborate manners and great formality which he uses superbly for his own protection and to insure his own privacy.” In his privacy K often fell in love with his opposite—big men with big, expansive feelings; the turn-on for him was in trying to stitch them up and make them behave properly. We always failed him.

  SL met K a few months after I met SL, who said, after meeting him: I watched you guys walk into the restaurant, and I thought: “Oh, they’re married.” We were. At college K studied art history, and I studied him. That’s how you recognize love: you’ve never met it before. Even before I knew who K was he interested me. At first, he irritated me. Sitting behind him as a Tintoretto or a Gorky flashed across one art history course screen or another, I saw K’s neck, his freshly laundered shirt, his neatly sharpened pencils, and his readiness to do well. I didn’t recognize him because I didn’t recognize any of that in myself. Our love was a confusion of non-twinning, that is, we didn’t recognize anything of ourselves in the other. We were not lovers, or we were lovers in every way except one. I shall never forget how our lips felt when we’d kiss good-night. I shall never forget what his little body felt like, in sickness and in health. And I shall never forget him saying, “Oh, Bear,” as he hugged me good-night. I’ll never get over him, nor the fact that he understood how I was never able to grasp that, for most people, love and conflict were the same thing, and, if that was really the case, what did that say about their love? When it came to love, K was practical and traditional: for him, it was not separate from conflict and conflict was not separate from marriage. So when I would start to absent myself from a scene—the inevitable buildup that comes with getting close to anyone—K yelled, “Don’t withdraw!” as I climbed into his little bed. (We did some of our best thinking together lying in his bed.) His anger could not beat my silence, though, and so, after a while, he gave up and climbed into bed with me. Another time—K had finished college by then, I never did; he was living in the East Village, I’d just gotten my little flat in Brooklyn—K was angry with me about one thing or another. This time I wouldn’t take it. He stormed off to the supermarket; there, a black woman accidentally bumped into K’s cart with her own. K exploded—“I’ve had it with you people and your anger!”—a remark that not only made me laugh, but made me love him more. By then it was 19
87 or 1988, and we weren’t even thirty. K was thin and white and he loved and identified with white girls like Mariel Hemingway as she appeared in the 1979 motion picture Manhattan. I’d never felt like part of a couple before. We did things together. The only time I felt as though we’d separated was when we went to gay bars together. But when it comes to gay bars, it’s every man for himself. K was one pretty white girl. As such, he had a certain currency in those bars that made me feel jealous: couldn’t the world see he was mine? Couldn’t the world see I was his universe, and he mine? While we each had boyfriends (K more than me; I couldn’t physically take how much I wanted to be loved and how much I felt when I was; K was made of the world and, so, of much stronger stuff) they were animal-smart enough to know that the real connection was between K and myself. Inevitably, one of his boyfriends but more likely one of mine because that was the only real power they had in the relationship, threatening not to love me, they were men after all and getting there was always on their mind—anyway, more than one of these guys hit on K after they broke up with me. But I wouldn’t have known about it had K not told me. Once, after he relayed that So and So had come on to him, K said: “I don’t know why I told you that! I don’t know why!” I didn’t know why, either, but I knew who K was, and I knew he could and did fall in love with that which I could not love: the blowhard boy, the taking-up-too-much-space boy, the hysterical boy, the consumerist boy, because they were as glamour-struck as K was struck by their surface glamour. I wanted to love K as a lover but I wanted him to get this kind of person out of his system first. But couldn’t he see I loved him more than any of those horned-up lunkheads, and that he could sometimes be like them in that he wanted to get at some essential part of me that was my own and couldn’t be touched, in the Flannery O’Connor sense? Were all white girls like that?