‘Okay.’ He was barely panting. ‘Time out. I gotta shoot up.’ He opened a locker and took out a hypodermic needle and something else. ‘It’s kosher! I’m diabetic.’
I watched as he prepared the needle and injected himself.
‘Three and a half years ago, I passed out getting off a bus in Chicago. Best thing that could have ever happened to me. I found out I was diabetic. Never had a clue. According to people I’ve known, in the years just before the discovery I was a real downer, a complete schmuck. I blame it on being sick and not knowing I was. Now … well, now I guess I don’t have any more excuses, do I? Don’t look so serious!’ He slapped my arm.
He laughed, cleaned up and slammed shut the locker. We got a fresh grass juice each from the university-operated business, then went into the nearly vacant, well-equipped gym, where he selected a machine and routine and began it, asking me to either join him or stay nearby and spot him on the various machines. I chose that.
‘So, tell me’ – Weatherbury at last got around to the subject of my visit – ‘what St George only hinted at so tantalizingly?’
He seemed so open, I could have just spilled it all. Instead I said, ‘He told you that I’ve been getting Von Slyke’s papers organized to go to the Timrod Collection?’
‘And that you’d found a suspect manuscript.’
‘Well, I’ve got two more, what you call suspect manuscripts. And I’m beginning to suspect who wrote them. If I’m right, and in truth I’m really only partway there right now – well, it might be a considerable addition or new path in Purple Circle studies.’
‘Three manuscripts?’ he gushed. ‘Wow!’
‘All fragments. I’m not sure yet what they’re fragments of.’
‘Sounds intriguing,’ he grunted. ‘More! More!’
‘Well, that’s why I’m here. Von Slyke told me you knew Cameron Powers personally …’
‘He did?!’
For a second I wondered if I’d been led astray. ‘I’m terribly sorry if I’m wrong. Only yesterday, he told me on the phone …’
‘I’m kidding! I’m kidding!’ Weatherbury assured me. ‘I thought everyone knew I was Cameron Powers’s catamite.’
‘Catamite?’
‘We lived together and he porked me regularly and paid my bills for nearly two years. What would you call it? Come on. Don’t act shocked. Minute I laid eyes on Powers, I told my best friend I was going to get him in the sack no matter what it took. It turned out it didn’t take much. I was just an undergrad at the time: and the cutest I’ve ever looked in my life. He was on the skimpiest of book tours for the paperback version of his one published book. How he managed to arrive in New Haven, I’ll never know. But all of us in school were reading the other Purples and we all knew he’d been Von Slyke’s lover and that he knew the others, so we showed up at the reading. There must have been six of us, including the bookstore manager, one woman from a local gay rag and a guy taking notes for a term paper. Afterwards me and my best friend invited Powers out for a drink at a local gay-friendly bar. To our amazement he accepted. And to my amazement afterward, Powers took me to his hotel room and screwed the bejesus out of me. Never having been so expertly or assiduously analized before, I naturally fell in love. I visited him a dozen times that summer and when I graduated and moved to Manhattan to go to Columbia Grad School, I haunted his doorstep till he let me in. I moved out of the dorm and into his apartment in January for the spring term. I stayed there till he kicked me out.’
During the remainder of his physical routine, Weatherbury told me the rest of the story. They argued so badly, they’d come to blows. It wasn’t until Powers was hospitalized and in the last stages of a massive pancreatic degeneration as a result of HIV infection that they’d seen each other again. He phoned Weatherbury out of the blue, told him he was dying, and that he didn’t trust any of the people who’d begun hovering around him like vultures. Reuben had dropped everything and flown to his side. No tearful farewells, but he’d taken over the remaining three months of Powers’s life, arranged for a will to be written, arranged the burial and memorial services, found and fed him cocaine when he was asked to do so, and watched Powers sink daily until he reached first coma then oblivion. No one was more surprised than Weatherbury when the will was read and he was made literary executor. The other Purples weren’t in the least surprised: Cameron had intended to do it for years.
‘So!’ Reuben concluded. ‘That’s how I became the main Cameron Powers scholar. Sort of reminds me of what Mae West used to say.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘She used to say, keep a diary when you’re young. When you’re old it’ll keep you,’ Weatherbury laughed. ‘In my case, it was keeping Powers happy when I was young that’s going to keep me when I’m old.’
He was finished. We hit the juice stand, this time for some carrot-ginger concoction, then we jogged back out of the Phys. Ed. building and back to the English Department.
Reuben changed shirts and threw me a towel.
‘So? How can I help you?’
‘Well, I guess for starters, you could help me locate any possible references to Len Spurgeon in any files or letters you may have that belonged to Cameron Powers.’
‘Len Spurgeon? Yeah, I remember the name.’ He hit some buttons on his computer screen and said, ‘Okay. We’ve got thirteen minor references. Citations by name only. That sort of stuff. Then we have two full pages. I’ll bring that up, okay?’
‘What is that anyway? Powers’s letters? His journals? Or what?’
‘Who told you Powers wrote letters or kept journals?’
‘No one. I just guessed.’
‘Guess again. What we’re looking at is whatever I wrote. Either at the time I was living with Cameron. Or later on, after everything had come to me.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said, as the computer screen opened the file, which he was blocking from view.
‘How do I put this?’ Reuben began. ‘Well, there’s no way but one way to say it: Cameron Powers wrote virtually nothing himself. Whatever you’re seeing was written by someone else. Most of it is my notes for a sort of biography or book about Powers and the others. You see, Ross, Powers was dyslexic.’
‘Dyslexic? How can that be? He was a writer? A senior book editor for a major publisher? If he couldn’t read and write …’
‘He could read. Up to a point. Never too fast, of course. But enough for letters and memos and suchlike. He’d taught himself enough tricks by then to read okay. As for longer things. Well, he’d scan them and work from reader’s reports. But his writing was completely … He’d dictate everything … I see you don’t believe me. Look at this!’ He hit another button, opened another file in a window over this one and showed me.
That winter Dame got a big enough advance that we were able to move down to this wonderful second-story apartment on Duval Street in the Old City of Key West. It was located just off Darkie Town, so we heard roosters crowing every morning, the same fowl that were sacrificed at night in Macumba ceremonies we’d recognize from all the drumming and strange shrieks. By day we’d leisurely lunch, bicycle down to the local beach, come back home and nap, have a cocktail, and join friends for dinner until long past midnight. One day, however, Dame said, ‘We’ve been here a month and haven’t done a stitch of work. Time – not to mention my cash advance – is a wasting. We’ve got to get to work, boy!’ So we did. In the morning, he’d write in bed, on a pad of yellow foolscap, while I slept or tried to get him to play with me. But after lunch, or on rainy afternoons, we’d work on Via Appia together, we managed to get parts one and two of it done then.
‘That was in the winter of 1979,’ Weatherbury said. ‘I arrived on the scene 1981. He’d not done anything further in the book. I myself helped Cammy with parts two and three. One section from the latter chapter, retitled ‘The Pines – and Pimps – of Rome’, was cobbled together by the two of us and appeared in the Fall 1981 issue of the Sewanee Review. After that,
the MS sat. Until, that is, Len moved in. What follows Cameron told me during those daily work sessions we had when he was at St Vincent’s Hospital.’
Reuben closed that window and opened another windowed file. He scanned it a minute, until the cursor began to be underlined black, then said, ‘Here goes!’
I met Len for about the third time at one of the Leo-McKewens’ famous tea parties uptown. I’d arrived late, and he was about to leave, having just had some kind of a tiff with the Fried Chicken heiress. I complimented him on his boots, never mind what else he was wearing, and for some reason he didn’t bite my head off, but instead talked with me a while. We left the place together and headed for a local Chinese restaurant. Over Prawns from Lo Mountain he found out I was living alone, and that I had a spare room. He needed a place and said he’d help with the rent. Len moved in a few days later, and I soon discovered that he was a lot more fun in my own bed than on that single mattress in the so-called den. About a month or so after he’d moved in, he somehow or other found the MS of Along the Via Appia or at least as much of it as I’d done, and read it and said, why the hell didn’t I finish it? And I said, why the hell don’t you help me? So he did. We did not only parts four and five. But revised the whole thing. He was awfully smart at editing, suggesting words, choosing syntax. He had a natural sense of how words flow and how they denote and connote. I couldn’t have done the book without him. And I wanted to dedicate it to him or at least acknowledge his help, but he said no. So I didn’t. Whatever happened to him? Last I heard he was hanging around with Dom De Petrie. God, was he beautiful! I can remember waking up from a nap one afternoon and watching him sleeping, laying on his back, and I thought, I’m not crazy about this man, but I surely could be.
I suppose I must have looked surprised, because Reuben said, ‘What? What is it?’
I didn’t want to immediately respond to the De Petrie connection, so instead I asked, ‘I suppose I’m surprised by how, you know, flip, unserious he sounds when talking about his writing.’
‘All of them. All the Purples. I’m not kidding. De Petrie once wrote under the title page of Mark Dodge’s Keep Frozen – ‘Semen on Board’. And they were always changing the names of each other’s books in letters. You know Irrigations for Instigations, that kind of thing. But, of course, Cameron was almost the worst.
I’d been thinking. Now I had to ask. ‘If you and Von Slyke and Len Spurgeon wrote Cameron Powers’s first book, then who …’
‘Wrote the stories in the second book?’ Reuben finished for me. ‘I did. Mostly while he was in the hospital. He had notes. God, he had entire sections of them written down. After a fashion.’
‘He wasn’t in terrible pain? I heard pancreatic cancer …’
‘He wasn’t in pain whenever I brought him cocaine. Which, yes, I did regularly. Which he took regularly. Then I couldn’t keep him in bed, or shut him up. De Petrie came to visit and forgot his little microcassette recorder. I arrived maybe a half-hour later and Cameron was moaning and carrying on. Once he’d snorted, however, he all but leapt out of bed, and began telling me the story about the drag queen Jackie Von Vetch, you know, “Miss Thing” in the story. I just grabbed the microcassette and began recording it. I used it for the next two months. Only after Cameron died did I return it to De Petrie. At the memorial service I handed it to him as he came in the door. He looked at me and said, “I knew I’d left it there, but Cammy said no”.’
While I was absorbing that information, Reuben asked ‘So? Is this guy Len the one you’re interested in?’
‘He seems to pop up in all of their lives. I’m working on a sort of theory … it’s not developed yet. You don’t have anything else, do you? On Len?’
‘Only an anecdote that Cameron told me. Let me see –’ he turned back to the computer and brought up yet another window, searched through that and said, ‘Okay, here it is.’
Len had been living with me for about three months when one night, maybe four o’clock in the morning, the phone rings. I pick it up and a very official voice on the other end asks to speak to him. It’s four o’clock in the morning. We’ve just gone to bed – what? – two hours before. Len’s out like a light. I try to wake him up. Get nowhere. So I ask the man who he is and what it’s all about. He tells me he’s from the INS, Immigration Service, and that he’s got a Leonard Spurgeon Junior in custody, directly arrived on a flight from El Salvador and he can’t allow him through customs until one of his parents comes to get him.
As you can imagine, I wake right up at this news. But despite my efforts, when I shake Len and tell him all this, he sort of murmurs, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Tell him we’re coming.’ Which I do. Then when I hang up the phone and ask him what in the hell that was all about, he says to me, ‘Call Haifa car service. We need a limo to go to the airport.’ Which I also do.
Well, you can imagine my continued surprise and annoyance as we dress and go down to the rented limo and drive all the hell to JFK airport and Len – who takes even longer than I do to wake up as a rule – sleepily murmurs nothing like an acceptable answer to my eleven hundred questions.
We get to the INS office and there, sleeping in a bassinet, is the cutest, brownest-skinned, blackest-haired, three-months-old baby boy you’ve ever seen. No way this is Len’s baby. But Len signs all the papers, and they give us the baby. Who gurgles and coos in his sleep and holds my finger with his hand in the back-seat of the limo all the hell back to East 24th Street in Manhattan.
We go back to sleep, all three of us, and the next day, as casual as possible, Len wakes up, has breakfast and phones some lawyer who arrives that afternoon, with this very handsome Jewish couple in their early forties who, it seems, are going to adopt the baby. All the papers are signed and passed over and the Salvadoran baby is out of the apartment by eight o’clock that night.
Turns out that Len was down there, in El Salvador, when he was in college or shortly after on some student exchange program, and he either had an affair with or became close friends with (it’s not too clear) this woman who it turns out is part of the intellectual leftist organization fighting our CIA-supported right-wing government. Her job is to manage to get the small children of leftists who are arrested and executed in the middle of the night by right-wing death squads out of the country by bribing the maids to say the kids are their own and to hide them in their rooms when the parents are dragged away. The children are then put on a plane and secreted into the US, where adoptive parents are all lined up waiting for them. It’s an underground railroad for these poor kids, and Len is a crucial link. Everyone, including the INS, knows what’s going on. He’s down there at that JFK shed once every month or so. It’s all a charade. Yet … He’s a fabulous man, isn’t he?
‘Do you think you could print that out for me?’ I asked.
Reuben not only printed it out, he also gave me a disk copy of the two pieces of Cameron Powers’s papers to contain long references to Len. ‘So, you going to meet with the surviving Purples?’ he asked, as we headed out of his office and toward the parking lot.
‘I’ve already met with Damon Von Slyke, naturally, and I’ve spoken on the phone with Aaron Axenfeld,’ I said.
‘Well, you saved the real treat for last, didn’t you?’
‘You mean De Petrie? I don’t get it. In all the articles and biographies about the nine of them, De Petrie comes off as the easiest-going, the most fun-loving of them all. How did he become … I mean he’s a recluse, doesn’t write, or at least doesn’t publish. Have you heard his phone message?’
We’d arrived at my car in the parking lot. Reuben leaned against it to retie his sneakers ‘You’ll have to ask the others what happened to him. I don’t know. I always deal with him – when I’m absolutely forced to do so – by letter. Usually certified or registered mail. Since that’s the only kind he doesn’t send back. You wouldn’t want to stick around and join me and my lover for dinner? We’re meeting up with another gay couple. From the Math Department, believe it or not.’
I pleaded a previous engagement and we shook hands.
‘Tell St George I’m coming up there soon,’ Reuben signed off.
As I drove back to Los Angeles, I smiled. Not only had I made an important new ally, not only had I found out a crucial secret about Cameron Powers, but I’d also come closer to getting a more rounded picture of Len Spurgeon. Not only a sexy guy, a wit, a tease, a game player, a lover, but also a humane man, saving people’s lives. No wonder the Purples were so interested in him. Who wouldn’t be?
The restaurant where I was supposed to meet the students was located in the middle of a newish mall area along Yucca Avenue off Vine: a recent redevelopment turning the half-century-old Capitol Records Tower into a historical landmark and music industry theme park, complete with do-it-yourself recording studios, the Hollywood and Vine Michael Jackson Museum, and five new ‘official’ restaurants, each with its own individual topic, area and era: Adagio for the Classics (Italian-Asian cuisine); Beale Street for Jazz and Blues (Southern home cooking); La Bamba for Latino and Salsa (Tex-Mex cooking); Rockin’ Robin for Golden Oldies (standard burgers, fries and sodas); and the Flaming Needle for contemporary-post-alternative-new age-neo-funk (the menu as eclectic and changeable as the music itself). This time-evoking was of course carefully laid out among Disneyesque plazas, fountains and huge banks of flowering trees and bushes, and all of it was encircled by and ramped up to and away from the raison d’être of the entire thing: the four enormous shops – Virgin, Tower, HMV and DreamworksSKG – each within its own multistory glass tower, devoted to differing kinds of music, all of them more or less directly influenced in architectural and interior-decorating style by the presiding Capitol Records Tower. The idea, indeed the advertised guarantee, was that upon entering Hollywood-Vine Music City, you would be able to locate any piece of music – a dueling banjos tune, the 1905 De Reszke aria from Manon Lescaut, a never-released cut from the Bangles’ My Boyfriend’s Back album, the CD, videoptape, laserdisc, red-vinyl 45-rpm record, beta-max, 8-track, the original goddamn Edison cylinder if need be – of whatever you happened to crave to hear. Connecting chutes among the shops and related warehouses, as well as all the other, more specialized music boutiques in the three-block complex, would locate and deliver your choice to you before you drove out of the vast underground parking space, sometimes while you were sitting drinking a margarita at a terrace.
The Book of Lies Page 24