by Alice Bolin
“I was in the stream that had moved around me since I’d arrived. It had moved around me and not let me in and suddenly here I was, at this table, plunged into a world, everything moving swiftly but not passing me by,” Kushner’s narrator says about her night with the people with the gun, describing an experience that is not quite initiation, not inclusion even, but what could be a satisfying substitute. In L.A. I felt this stream move around me on the freeways as I wondered where everyone else was going and if I should be going there, too. There were nights I almost dipped into the stream. Once my cousin Tony, a reality TV producer who was trying to reinvent himself as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian, took me to an IKEA in Burbank with his friend, a much more successful comedian with stoned, bloodshot eyes, and an annoying woman I could never figure out. Was she the comedian’s girlfriend? Or also a comedian herself? We were looking for brown fabric to repair a sofa slipcover that the comedian had burned a hole in. This was an important mission because his roommate was very pissed. We smoked weed before we went in and Tony and I walked around looking at pillows.
“What would this place be like during an earthquake?” Tony said.
I looked at all the flimsy merchandise seeming to teeter above our heads.
“I think a lot about earthquakes,” Tony said. “But don’t worry. Los Angeles is a very earthquake-safe city. I’ve done the research.”
The woman and the comedian made fun of me for never having been to IKEA, like going there made them urban sophisticates. They dropped me home abruptly after we failed to find the fabric because Andy Dick wanted the comedian to come with him to Jumbo’s Clown Room, the famous hipster strip club.
I was thankful for the company but ultimately frustrated by this episode, mostly because I thought Tony was a dorky, desperate rube like me, despite the fifteen years he had spent in New York working in TV. A week afterward he sent me a string of seven text messages, which I immediately assumed was bad news about one of our elderly relatives. Instead, it was a story about how the woman we went to IKEA with had propositioned him. He turned her down because he didn’t want to step on the comedian’s toes—he was too valuable a professional connection. This left me profoundly bummed out about the entertainment industry. Tony avoided every opportunity to waste time, to be bored or embarrassed, to burn a bridge or break a heart, driven only by minute-by-minute calculations about how to advance his career, and he still had nothing to show for it. I thought he was an idiot. I believed that having an experience, even a messy one, was the way to tell the city you belonged.
This belief might also explain why, despite the comfort of family Tony provided, I didn’t really want to be hanging around a guy I was related to. My first six months in Los Angeles were a series of abortive crushes. I was obsessed with my coworker at my restaurant job, a UCLA dropout, probably because he knew what an MFA was. He taught me how to steal whole bags of Intelligentsia coffee beans from work, and I was convinced he was some sort of sociopathic genius. Another time, an old classmate who wrote for a famously maligned sitcom took me to a rooftop biergarten in Echo Park. Remembering how I had liked him in grade school band, I thought he might be my destiny. He sent me wistful text messages every few months after that, but we never hung out again.
These early extremes of hope were a prelude to the false hope frenzy I experienced when, bored of the days where I walked across the street to get pad thai or next door to buy hair ties at the dollar store or down the block to get a burrito from a truck—alone, alone, alone—I signed up for several online dating services. Good first dates led me to desperate sexting and crying in my kitchen. This was a useful if horrifying experience that I won’t linger on long. Internet dating confirmed that there were many men who wanted to date me. I had always been told they were out there, and here they were, unmasked. I was also exposed, uncomfortably, to all the men whom I did not want to date. Even as I bathed in the gorgeous sorrow of rejection, which my messy heart found in abundance, I learned to be the one who said no—not only to men I wasn’t attracted to but to those who made me feel bad, to those who were bad news. One of the best dates I had was with a hyperactive younger guy, a native Angeleno who told me, dubiously, that he was a fashion designer. We sang karaoke at the Brass Monkey and he kept suggesting we join a sloshy bachelorette party—they just seemed so fun. I stole his hat, a floral Dodgers snapback, as he walked me home. After he left, I impulsively texted him that I expected him to kiss me. He ran back to my door and gave me one perfect rom-com kiss. I told him I would give him his hat back on our next date, but it never happened. I was uncharacteristically tranquil about where things had ended. His hat is now somewhere in Silver Lake, at the home of my ex-boyfriend. This date foreshadowed a plot twist where, contrary to the stories I was used to telling about the character who was myself, I was not the one who got her heart broken.
In The Flamethrowers, when the narrator gets to New York, she calls a number she’s been given for her college crush, an older art student who paved her way to the city from Reno, but it’s been disconnected. A little while later, after a disappointing one-night stand, she calls it again. “It may go without saying that I was the type of person who would call a disconnected number more than once,” she says to explain the fantasy she was suspended in. I underlined this three times in my copy of the book. I know the shame in believing something could work out, that there is someone on the other end of the line who is as primed for love as you are: the naïveté the city is supposed to strip from you. But longing is such a pathetically feminine trait, one that we so often hate in ourselves and others. That night in The Flamethrowers when the narrator meets the people with the gun, their friend Ronnie tells her that she moved to New York to fall in love, which she immediately denies. Later, she says this felt like a trap. “I didn’t move here not to fall in love,” she says. “The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.”
My other favorite Hellos to All That are in the prose of Eileen Myles, the legendary New York poet. I met Myles when she was a visiting professor at my grad school in Montana. Her presence launched our entire program into a semester of manic excitement, even though she was extremely chill, dutifully showing up to every reading and drinking Diet Coke in a corner. My friends who were in her class told me that her highest praise was saying that something was art, or in her Boston accent, aht. I’ve reintroduced myself to her since and she only looked at me painedly, saying finally (for my benefit), “You look familiar.”
Myles’s wonderful, riffing biographical novels Inferno and Chelsea Girls depict “Eileen” showing up in New York City at twenty-five wondering if she can become what she secretly is: a poet and a lesbian. The titles Inferno and The Flamethrowers both recall clichés of initiation: “out of the frying pan and into the fire” or “a trial by fire,” figuring New York City as a flaming gauntlet for young women to pass through. With idiosyncratic cool, Myles writes all the mysterious and painful and ecstatic rites of passage Eileen endures in 1970s New York. One night a woman calls her and tells her she got her number from her stepbrother and wonders if Eileen could tell her about “opportunities in the poetry field.” It turns out she is not a writer but a prostitute, and Eileen spends one night working with her, on a “date” with a pair of Italian businessmen. Eileen takes the train to Queens once a month for years to get her speed prescription from a diet doctor, then sells the pills and gives them away to friends at downtown poetry workshops led by New York School poets like Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. She takes temporary jobs apple picking upstate or dip-dying picture frames in Maine.
Despite the monumental feel of Myles’s stories—especially in Chelsea Girls, where the chapters’ endings are often as brutal and abrupt as the kicker in a comic strip—her out-of-order episodes also evoke life as an undulating journey through a series of more or less similar days. In Inferno, she describes an early day in the city:
Here I was doin
g my laundry in New York. Watching my rags go round and round. I had escaped. Dogs on Thompson St. were barking, crazy people flying by in and out of the opened doors—a couple having a fight. I was reading a book. Life was like doing your laundry.
This daily rhythm is inextricable from the daily struggle to get and keep work—long-term or temporary, honest or illicit, skilled or menial—that runs through all of Myles’s writing. “At 59 I’ve come to identify myself as working class though kind of middle now,” she writes in the first essay in her collection of nonfiction, The Importance of Being Iceland, in her typical off-the-cuff style, which makes much of her prose read like a wonderful, dashed-off email from a friend. “I’m a poet and a novelist, one-time college professor, among other things. Generally as many things as possible.” Working-class jobs are marked by grinding or graceful repetitions, and the form of Myles’s novels—less a traditional plot arc than a series of oscillating waves—imitates the jobs her family worked: her father was a mailman, her aunt cleaned toilets at Harvard, and Eileen, in Inferno and Chelsea Girls, works in hotels, department stores, restaurants, bars, and factories. In fact, the practice of poetry seems like the perfect mimesis for the traditional work of the working class, a series of repetitions that pile up and go nowhere, small, inconsequential, and barely remunerative.
It is disarming in her novels how, despite the hepcat quality of her voice, Myles moves so freely between describing the druggy, queer, avant-garde world of seventies and eighties New York and Eileen’s conventional working-class Catholic childhood in Boston. These reminiscences serve as the formative experiences traditional to the biography form, but they are also random, nostalgic, and often ugly. Early in Chelsea Girls, there is a chapter in which twelve-year-old Eileen watches her father die. She feels her own perversity in the experience, unable to react correctly at the time or in the days after. Lacking the gracious maturity we often ascribe to grieving kids, she feels even younger than she is. “What was I, invisible,” she says. “Well, from now on I would be. If they think I am a kid, I will be a kid forever.” Thus the tragic origins of her life as an artist, forever playing, skirting respectability—though Myles refuses to connect the dots so cleanly.
At times Myles’s books adopt the narrative style of an older relative telling homely, macabre stories about people you’ve never heard of, like the chapter describing disgraced friends of her parents who both drank themselves to death in one weekend. She explores these humble origins not only to elucidate Eileen’s present through her past, but also to set her apart from the rest of the people in her New York scene. She is not only a queer poet but also a Catholic girl from Boston, and these alternating identities are the key to who she has become and also what she can get away with. The narrator of The Flamethrowers has the same tendency, insisting on her obscure past in Nevada, knowing it makes her both interesting and, on a deeper level, able to disavow the excesses of the art world. I can relate, as I moved to L.A. clinging to the purity of my provincialism, proud of my innocence of freeways and IKEA.
I also relate, though, to Eileen and the narrator of The Flamethrowers as they try to assert themselves as artists, despite all appearances. I worked long days at a restaurant in West L.A., where, more than ever before, I felt the disconnect between the myth of myself and my daily reality. “I’m a writer,” I insisted to my coworkers, and at the time I took their blank reactions as misunderstanding. They understood me. They all had ambitions, too. Now I see this as the ultimate in a kind of classist and racist pretension. I thought they all belonged there, but I didn’t. We want our humble, middle-of-nowhere histories to illustrate how unprepared we were for the city and how much we needed from it. We want them to differentiate our Hello to All That from everyone else’s in their trials and triumphs. But of course everyone has a history: a story about themselves that says, “Don’t blame me.”
2.
I bought two paperback copies of The Flamethrowers in the summer of 2014 at Skylight Books in Los Feliz: one for me and one for my boyfriend, C. Then I went outside to find that one of my car’s tires had deflated on a jagged curb on Vermont Avenue. My trunk was too forbiddingly stuffed with junk to access my spare tire, so AAA towed me to a tire yard on Fountain that was overrun with playing children, where I bought a random used tire for probably too much. My friends had been buzzing about The Flamethrowers for months. I didn’t know it would mark the emergence of a journey both forward and back in time for me: a way to articulate the connections between the stories that preoccupied me. In a way, I started writing this book that day with the flat tire. I had been working on it before then, but I thought I was writing “about the noir.” That day was when I slowly began to realize that my book was maybe not about the noir but about those forces of which the noir was a symptom, not about dead white girls but the more troubling mystery of living ones.
I knew I wanted to write about The Flamethrowers immediately. I saw in it an invitation to draw together some of my favorite books: Kushner was constantly compared to Joan Didion. She was writing about the same art moment that produced Eileen Myles, whom I was obsessed with. It was like a supplement to one of my favorite Janet Malcolm essays, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” about Artforum magazine, in which she documents the dying away of the conceptual art moment for the splashy, maximalist painting of the 1980s. The more I read, the more it all fit. I found a Myles essay about land artist Robert Smithson’s The Collected Writings. Smithson, who created the famous Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake, is Reno’s favorite artist, and Myles also loves him. “Reading Smithson today I get a second glimpse at the New York I stepped into in the ’70s,” she writes. I mulled over this project constantly but barely put a word on paper about it. Nearly three years later, here I finally am. These books were such a part of my intellectual identity that to write about them would require uncomfortably reassessing them, and myself, too. I didn’t want to question narratives about brainy, sad white women growing up or breaking down as they earned their cruel sentimental educations, because they assured me I wouldn’t have to work on myself: the world would work on me.
Malcolm’s “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” takes the form of a humorous eighty-five-page tour of artists’ and art critics’ New York lofts, as Malcolm travels around the city to interview them. Many of Artforum’s 1970s art critics were academics, who wrote articles as hard and dense as gemstones. The old guard of art critics were concerned that Artforum had become commercial with its hip new critics like the poet Rene Ricard at a time when the price of art was skyrocketing. These 1970s critics were against pop art and the collapsing of high and low culture. “We felt that we had to make a distinction between Mickey Mouse and Henry James,” one tells Malcolm, specifically blaming Susan Sontag for the trend of apostasy against high culture.
They believed that an art magazine should not have advertising and that artists should not care about money. As I read these conversations now, they feel like remnants of an America that was less shamefaced when it came to the calcified truth of class. The academic art critics were well-bred, Harvard-educated, and immune to money worries; thus they found the commercial distasteful. In their minds, it seems like their priestly class, freed from dependency on droning daily obligations and entertainments, is better able than workers to understand the anti-capitalist imperatives of Marx. Malcolm describes one of these critic’s opulent loft with its “curved black sofa, mirror-topped coffee table, abstract and Oriental art, and fur-covered bed” as looking “more like a Park Avenue co-op than like a downtown living space,” before the critic launches into a tirade about how bourgeois the art world has become.
In fact, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” documents a theme that repeats in Myles’s work and The Flamethrowers: the morning-after feeling that suffuses all art scenes, as discontented gatekeepers insist that the generation before you got there were the authentic artists and revolutionaries, and those in the scene now can hope only to drink from their dregs. Smithson died two years before the narra
tor of The Flamethrowers got to New York. Eileen studies at the feet of the New York School poets, ten years after their 1960s heyday, still in the elegiac twilight of the death of Frank O’Hara. She and Ricard were friends, and they were both part of a new New York School, who, like their forebears including O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery, frequently made money by writing about art. The 1970s academics despised how writers like Myles and Ricard applied the disarming intimacy of the poetry of the New York School to a new unbuttoned art moment. I see more and more that every avant-garde finds ways of looking not forward, but back, trying to strip away present encumbrances to return to a radically simpler version of beauty: from the Surrealists’ belief in dreams disrupting industrial society to the seventies critics’ desire to return to a time before the reign of Mickey Mouse.
The “girl” of Malcolm’s title is Ingrid Sischy, who in 1979, at the age of twenty-seven, took over as editor in chief at Artforum. Sischy was an outsider, with experience in publishing art books but no training in art history, who brought to the magazine good instincts for provocative cover art, a desire for interesting, gestural writing, and extraordinary patience when dealing with artists and critics. Malcolm depicts her as the opposite of the 1970s art critics, innocent of ideological prejudice and possessing a very un-elitist obsession with ethics and fairness. Malcolm compares her relationship with Sischy with the frustration one feels toward the upright and optimistic heroines of Henry James: those “moments when the thread of sympathetic attention snaps and we fretfully wonder why these girls have always to be so ridiculously fine.”
Rereading Malcolm, I did a double take at this passage. It had become almost eerie how often the literature of the nineteenth century, and particularly Henry James, was invoked to discuss the real and fictional inhabitants of the mid-century New York art scene. As much proof as I had that avant-gardes were backward-looking, I hadn’t previously thought they looked back so far. In The Importance of Being Iceland, Myles sees the roots of radicalism and her artistic itinerancy in the nineteenth century, pointing out that the nineteenth was the century of Karl Marx, who invented the working class “like he’s our Santa and we’re the elves.” In The New York Times review of The Flamethrowers, Cristina García writes that the book’s narrator “is a modern Henry James heroine—a rough-riding Daisy Miller, say—who wanders far from home and submits to what turns out to be a very unsentimental education at the hands of reputed sophisticates.”