The third set of pages faxed to me was a remarkably inconsistently spelled few pages about a late at night drive in a gigantic rattling old Hispano-Suiza ‘cabriolet’ convertible through the streets of downtown Mobile, Alabama, by two characters, the narrator alternately named Louie and Lewie, and a great flaming black queen usually called Miss Rich or Miss Bitch-to-You, Boy. This I supposed to be an early draft or perhaps even the primal nugget out of which eventually had grown the eponymous tale, ‘“Miss Thing” and the ’41 Bugatti’ of Cameron Powers’s posthumous collection, completed by Reuben Weatherbury. Three down. None to go.
I was just biting down on that good-news/bad-news when Conchita appeared in the library doorway.
‘Did he say when they’re coming back?’ she asked.
That surprised me a little. I thought she already knew.
‘Not for a while. They’re going to Majorca today. Was there something you wanted to tell Mr Von Slyke.’
‘No. Nothing,’ she said, which sounded lame to me. She left the doorway and, a second later, was back. ‘By the way … what happened to your car?’
‘Nothing! Why?’
‘It looks all screwed up. You know, like someone keyed it? I noticed when I drove in this morning.’
‘Keyed it?’
By this time, I was up and moving. I ran to my room and grabbed the car keys and hurried out through the courtyard to the motor court. At first I noticed nothing. The car looked fine. From what she’d said, I expected great swaths of damage. From what, I couldn’t begin to think. Had I inadvertently come too close to something last night while driving along Laurel Canyon Boulevard? And if so, wouldn’t I have heard something? Noise of the damage as it was being made? As I got closer to the car, it suddenly appeared, became unmistakable: as though someone had used black chalk to make big lines and swirls and curlicues all along the pale blue side fenders, hood, trunk. Lines of it everywhere. Only when I touched it, it didn’t rub off. And when I spit in a tissue and rubbed at it it didn’t erase or smudge. It hadn’t been penned on, it had been gouged out of the carpaint itself. Now I understood why Conchita had used the words ‘keyed it’: someone had used a metal key to do this. Someone had deliberately done this. I circled the car and began to notice oddly placed and scuffed dents where each door reached the top fender trim: near each door handle, scuff marks as though from shoes. As though someone had kicked the car in anger. Who would do such a thing? … Ray Rice jumped into my mind. But why would he do this and then leave the teddy bear? If he had done it? If he had left the bear? But I also thought of that crazy woman in Encino last night with her paper note fluttering, shouting about how I’d taken her parking spot. She’d even had keys in her hand.
‘S’a shame,’ Conchita commiserated, ‘a nice-looking car like this!’
‘It’s a rental car. I’d better call this in.’
‘You’ll have to pay something,’ she said with such assurance in her voice that for a second I wondered if she’d done it.
An hour later, I’d discovered I would have to pay something, but not the entire cost of the repainting the car would require. As I’d taken a long lease on the car, I’d received the maximum liability insurance. I’d have to come up with a secondary payment to extend it, two hundred dollars. That stunk. But when I left the house later on that day, bringing one box of the Von Slyke papers to be photocopied at a place he’d recommended, and looked at the poor marred convertible in which I’d only last night had such a wonderful experience, I felt sad, the same way I would have felt if someone attractive I’d slept with had been discovered beaten, requiring hospitalization, stitches.
While I was outside looking at the car, Camden Phoenix of all people phoned and left a return call, in which he’d pointedly mentioned the fact that he was currently only partly employed. This was clearly a message about him needing, indeed requiring, money, for which Tanya Cull had already prepared me. So when I called back and actually got him on the phone, I said, ‘About money, you realize that I’m not a publisher. Not an editor. I’m a graduate student at UCLA, doing my thesis on the Purple Circle. I don’t come equipped with much of a budget.’
Silence greeted that. Then in that accent which by now I was sure was phoney, he testily asked, ‘Then why are you bothering me?’
‘Not that money can’t be found, if it turns out that you have in your possession something I can use,’ I quickly replied. ‘And, in fact, should my thesis be published in book form, as it probably will be, there could be reprint-rights money in the picture. Not a lot, naturally, since it will be a university press … but something.’
‘Well,’ less testily, ‘perhaps we can do business,’ he replied. ‘I’m not, after all, a foundation for college students … yet!’ he added.
We made plans to get together at his address that night at six-thirty. Just before we disconnected, I wondered whether to ask if he thought his neighbor might have vandalized my car. But it had already been such a mixed morning, I didn’t dare risk it.
‘Higher!’ Camden Phoenix insisted.
‘This is as high as I reach,’ I insisted back.
‘Okay! Hold that frame piece still.’
‘I am holding it still,’ I protested.
‘No, you’re not. You’re wiggling it.’
He finally found it motionless enough to mark the wall with a pencil point. My arms were killing me from holding up for so long the large, weighty, green graphite blackboard while he took his sweet time to mark off spots where he would insert butterfly screws. Having at last mastered the arcane art of marking off spots, Camden now sailed into the equally complicated task of hammering a nail into the plasterboard wall, not a half-inch, not a quarter of an inch, but three-sixteenths of an inch deep. That done, he took up his automatic drill. The screwholes were relatively quickly made, but then he had me hold it all up again while he engaged in the elaborate chore of emplacing butterfly screws. I was made to heft the graphite board yet again, while he used a contrasted attachment to the drill to tediously drive the screws home. Satisfied, he stood away from the wall and looked it over.
‘Not bad,’ he declared. ‘Now for the next one.’
‘Carpenter’s journeymen hire out at ten dollars an hour, you know,’ I said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, an edge of menace in his voice.
I wasn’t to be cowed. ‘It means that I didn’t come here to help you build your martial arts studio,’ I said. ‘I came here to interview you. Perhaps to find out something about Frankie McKewen and the other Purple Circle members.’
‘I know that,’ he growled. ‘I also know this work isn’t going to do itself. And I also know that you have nothing to offer in return for my knowledge except pie in the sky promises about some future possible publication. Which doesn’t do me a shitload of good now, does it? Does it?’ he repeated.
‘So you’re saying that in return for helping you here, you’ll tell me what I want to know? Is that the deal?’
‘What else you have to offer?’ He looked me up and down and his face said as much as his words. ‘Forget that I asked. The very last thing I need in my fool life at this moment is a piece of young ass. What I need is a second pair of hands to get this work done. C’mon now, youngblood, lift the sign!’
I was going to ask if it had ever crossed his mind that people did things without pay, did things without requiring that you do something in return? However, it was crystal clear that in Camden Phoenix’s universe they didn’t. So I hefted the next object, a slightly less heavy framed sign to go into the front window, and held it up, staggering from the weight, until he’d arrived at the end of his time to mark and drill and insert and drill again.
He was right about one thing: the space needed work before it could open. Even though once complete, it probably wouldn’t include more than a bare parquet floor with a few canvas-covered mats, a brace of wooden folding chairs, the sign and hanging blackboard – the last I assumed for him to draw strategy diag
rams. The ceiling was a chalky white patterned tin painted before he’d moved in but still clean. The floor had apparently been swabbed, sanded for smoothness, then waxed to a high, even slippery, gloss. The windows appeared newly washed. The ample window ledges looked recently painted. The colossal houseplants set upon them that I’d seen when peeking in the day before seemed well cared for: trimmed and watered, they’d even had their leaves shined. Even the rolls of dark green construction paper that I assumed had found their way here from some photographer’s studio were newish and unsoiled.
Only in the small chamber behind this public one, in the room labeled ‘office’ that appeared to be anything but – its door quickly closed when I’d first been admitted a half-hour ago – was it unmistakable that someone was also living here. A brief peek had enabled me to see dozens of messily stacked, miscellaneously sized cardboard boxes, a low-built, poorly made, planked bookshelf atop which sat a flat-screened TV and a superannuated phone-answering fax/printer/copier. A double futon lay more or less flat on the floor, partially obstructed from view by a transportable, upright, canvas sided wardrobe and what had to be a truly ancient artifact: a naugahyde-covered bean bag from the 1960s in an exceptionally putrid tinge of mustard that suggested it might have initially have been either canary yellow or ivory-colored.
‘You’re damned useful,’ Camden said, ‘when you keep your mouth shut.’
‘I’m not going to much longer,’ I said. ‘What else do you need me to do?’
I couldn’t see anything more, but he could. He needed a writing desk from the back room carried out, and he required me to hold up a large, slender-framed (and thus over-flexible) poster taken from a martial arts festival in Seoul, so he could tell where it would look best. Then, of course, hang it.
I took advantage of a microscopic break to say, ‘I take it that you and Professor Cull don’t get along all that well.’
‘Professor Who?’
‘Cull. Tanya Cull.’
‘Oh! Her!’
‘The two of us had a long talk,’ I said. ‘A few long talks. But somehow or other, I never managed to figure out your exact relationship to Frankie McKewen.’
‘That’s because she didn’t want you to figure it out. I was his boyfriend the last five years of his life. You get it? The reason she’s not letting you know?’
‘You mean because she’s so busy projecting her own fantasy about her uncle, Mitch Leo, and Frankie McKewen that she can’t accept the possibility that their relationship wasn’t as conventionally happy as she’d prefer to present it?’
‘You just said a mouthful. ’Course, all that might have been different if I weren’t black,’ he added.
‘You’re not black. You’re whiter than I am.’ Which was true. His skin color was so milky, with ruddy cheeks and abundant freckling all over, that my own – now aided by a fresh tan – looked in comparison swarthy. His eyes were green. His hair was strawberry blond. Yet it was also true that his hair, while fair, was curly enough to be considered ‘kinky’, while his smooth, handsome facial features could have signified one of a dozen differing genetic combinations of Caucasian, Native American, Mongoloid and Negroid.
‘Tech-nic-ally speaking, that’s so,’ he admitted. ‘But when I’m with white folks, they always wonder what in the hell I am. When I’m with black folks, I’m considered a “brother”. You know, sort of a High Yaller.’
‘Nowadays though it’s all so mixed up. Half the students in my class at UCLA are of mixed-race parents. Nobody cares.’
‘They’re fortunate. They sure enough did care when I was a kid.’
Along with his unusual physical characteristics I’d also been trying to gauge his age. I had figured no more than forty. Though that made little sense in my Purple Circle chronology. The way he was talking, he was far older.
‘You mean you were a kid in the ’60s? During the Civil Rights marches and all?’ I asked, daring him to confirm it.
‘I was born in ’67. But don’t think I didn’t come in for my share! You kids today have it easy, you know.’
As he spoke I began calculating. ‘Then you were sixteen when you met Frankie McKewen?’ I found that hard to believe.
‘Sixteen. And he was forty years old. Older than my daddy. Though at the time I was sure he was only thirty-five or so. You shocked?’ And before I could answer, he went on, ‘He didn’t know I was only sixteen. I was already this big. I’d shot up at fourteen. Never grew an inch after. And because of where we all met. He later told me he thought I was under twenty-one, which was how old I told him I was. But it was only when he caught me with my algebra textbook that he found out I was still in high school. Of course, among the Other Countries and Blackheart Collectives, I was always the baby and more a guest than full member. You ever hear of those?’
I did, a bit. I remembered reading about them in Erling Cummings’s book on the Purples. ‘Donald Woods, Assotto Saint,’ I hazarded. ‘They met at the Twelfth Street Center in New York …’
Camden brightened up. ‘Well, you aren’t completely stupid!’
‘They evolved out of two previous groups that got going in the ’70s. Black and White Men Together and Men of All Colors?’ I hazarded. ‘Is that your connection with Frankie McKewen?’
‘That’s right. Frankie and I think maybe Dominic De Petrie too were in those early groups, doing readings and fund-raisers and I don’t know, maybe also in demonstrations. It was a tough thing, a really tough thing to even admit being African-American and gay in those times. The political brothers were always down on you, calling you a sister-boy, saying that homosexuality was “the white man’s disease” and all that shit. It was hard. The black gay brothers needed whatever help they could get and they took it wherever they believed it was given honestly. They got it at last, and then they demanded respect and they got that too. But it was a long struggle. Hard to explain to kids nowadays, how long, how hard!’
‘“The Second Harlem Renaissance”,’ I offered. ‘That’s how Dr St George characterized those writers. He also mentioned that almost none of the members of the gay group lived in Harlem.’
‘Some did. Roy Gonsalves and Joe Beam. Ron Dildy. They also lived in Chelsea and the Village – Isaac Jackson and Dave Frechette. Yves and Jan. And a lot of them in Brooklyn, because rents were cheaper. Suggs. But that’s what it was all right, a renaissance. A brief flowering, all too soon over. By 1995, all but a few were dead. But it was glorious while it lasted. Every year there was another anthology: Black and Queer, In the Life, The Road Before Us, Here to Dare, with new discoveries galore. And it seemed that every few months another black gay man would emerge as a writer with his book of poetry, or his novel, or his new play, as though out of some underground cocoon! It was fabulous. And I was there. Sitting at their feet. Knowing I’d never be as good a poet as Yves or Donald. Never be as angrily eloquent as Essex or Marlon. Never be as committed to being “black” as Melvin. But you know what? They listened to my third-rate efforts with respect and every one of them encouraged me. It was a beautiful time to be young. New York was a beautiful place too, even with all the dirt and the noise and the prejudice. My! The people! The places! The Sound Factory! The Nickel Bar! Paradise Garage with Junior as DJ!’
‘You met Frankie McKewen at a reading?’
‘Actually, I met him at a party. I can’t remember where exactly. It wasn’t given by any of the major players of the group. Some hanger-on had thrown it. But I do remember it was summertime and, despite the air conditioning, I was still quite warm. I was wearing a rayon shirt, you know, one of those Hawaiian numbers. Gigunda yellow hibiscus on a field of black. I kept all the buttons opened. By then Frankie had been writing his column “Off Amsterdam Avenue” for several years. So when someone mentioned he was at the party and asked did I want to meet him, I said sure. Well, my mouth almost fell open when I was introduced to him. Not because he was the only white man there, you understand. He wasn’t. In fact his lover, Mitch Leo, was there. Of course, Jam
es Turcotte was always hanging around the group, wanting to be a part of it. There were a few other white guys too. But it was because Frankie wrote that column from so inside being a brother, you know what I’m saying? Casual, informal yet cool … it was so much the way I always thought a real sophisticated brother would write that I’d just always assumed McKewen was black. So I stood there meeting him, looking like some farmboy fresh out of cotton country, saying something stupid about how thrilled I was. But I wasn’t, you know, because I felt … well, how do I explain it, deceived? I guess you’d say. And I could tell that Frankie understood everything going on in my mind as I was thinking it. He was wearing this sort of sly yet understanding smile. Finally I tried to get away, saying something like “see you later”, and he took my arm lightly at the elbow and he said, “Okay, later. It’s a promise. Right?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I pulled loose even though I wanted to stay next to him, just be near him, since I was attracted at the same time I was repulsed. He let go of me and then he said, “By the way, don’t button that shirt for the next ten years!” Someone laughed. I knew it was a terrific compliment, and I blushed like crazy. Did all I could to stay away from him at that party. I was that interested. My pecker was especially interested in him. Even with all the complications. Someone pointed out Frankie’s lover, who was handsome, and I saw that they left together, and I thought well, honey, that’s it! You just forget that white man.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t. And he didn’t either. There was this reading I went to a week or two later at the Gay Community Center on West 12th Street in the Village. Essex Hemphill had come up from DC. The gang was all there. It was on the first floor in that place. You know, the building was still being converted from an old elementary school and there was construction stuff everywhere: bundles of wires twice your size in one corner, wooden lathing and plasterboard, and even water piping. Cement dust covered everything. Even so, it was the main floor of the place, which our group hadn’t even had to demand – it had been offered – and Essex was still doing his fire and brimstone act, as a hundred people had come out for it, and not only brothers either. It helped that it was an unexpectedly cold night. And there was Frankie McKewen. Without Mitch. This time the reception was held right there, it being too cold outside, where they’d originally planned it. Frankie got me alone fast, and he asked me if I was “jailbait” and we teased around, but I took him back to my room and once I had that man in my arms no other would do.
The Book of Lies Page 34