by Alice Bolin
The foremost of these reputed sophisticates is Sandro Valera, an older, well-established artist whose work consists of large, austere aluminum boxes. The narrator and Sandro fall in love, and he initiates her into his social world, immediately giving her access to a more glamourous New York than she could imagine from her dingy studio apartment on Mulberry Street. Sandro is the scion of Moto Valera, an enormous Italian motorcycle and tire manufacturer, and the narrator rides motorcycles, even riding a Moto Valera in college in Reno. In this coincidence lies her Jamesian date with destiny. She is obsessed with documenting the land speed trials at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah by entering them herself, hoping to create an art piece that melds the hick motorcycle culture of her upbringing and her conceptual interest in landscape, erosion, and duration.
To her own surprise, once at Bonneville, she sets a new female land speed record. She gets the opportunity to tour Italy with the Valera team, but first she must spend two weeks with Sandro’s mother at the Valera family villa above Lake Como. The signora and Sandro’s brother, Roberto, fear violence at the hands of the anarchists and unionists who are leading a workers’ revolution in Italy. The tension of this dread is multiplied by the mute presence of the villa’s servants, who lurk, almost invisible, at the corners of life in the villa. It turns out at least one of their servants really is planning to turn on the Valeras: they were marked people, just as they suspected. The narrator’s problem is she doesn’t know where her allegiance lies. She has ascended, a part of the class whom the servants wait on, but she relates to their invisibility, feeling distinctly unseen and unheard. Even after she has left the villa and joined ranks with the anarchists, she still holds herself apart: their invisibility is societal; hers is emotional, existential. Like I did with my coworkers at the restaurant, she makes the mistake of thinking her frustration is special.
As in any Gothic story, there is a genteel household in Western Europe paying for its plundering, a beautiful surface that cannot conceal its depths of moral ugliness, a brave new future that must pay for its barbaric past. As if to hammer home the backwardness of the decaying aristocracy, the narrator’s final break with the Valeras comes when she finds Sandro kissing his cousin. But the narrator is just as corrupt, even if her failing is of a different kind. Her personal journey dwarfs the politics of the Valeras and the anarchists; those conflicts serve only as set pieces to illustrate inner conflicts. This is why she can infiltrate both worlds, so American, an emotional mercenary.
True to genre, my sentimental education also pivoted on a date with destiny. Having reached the age of twenty-five without achieving either of the milestones I associated with legitimacy—a real boyfriend or a real job—I was convinced that my time had passed, and I would never get either. In late April of my first year in California, my grandmother turned ninety. She had a potent matriarchal power: her little studio apartment was like her lair, cluttered with books, eldritch religious art, chocolate, and cookies. She never left except to go downstairs for meals, and she sat in her armchair with newspapers stuffed around her, along with holy cards and tokens in little pouches like a witch’s hoard, watching Murphy Brown on DVD. On her birthday I talked to her about my woes and she told me that she would be saying Hail Marys for me. (This was her modification to the rosary that eliminated the boringly male Our Father and the dead weight of the Glory Be.) That night I got a call from an arts high school two hours east of L.A. officially offering me a job as their poet in residence, a real academic appointment. The night was glowing from a rare L.A. thunderstorm. While I was at dinner, I got a message on a dating app from my soon-to-be first boyfriend, C, asking if the storm had made the sky strange where I was, cloudy but bright.
For our first date he invited me to a barbecue at his house. “We’re supposed to meet in a public place,” I told him, reminding him of every cyber-safety tip I learned in the nineties. “I’m inviting a lot of people,” he told me. “If you come to my house and there’s no one out front, you can leave.” There were a lot of people out front, including his childhood best friends and his brother. They were almost too welcoming. All of his friends were incredibly interested in my writing and my new job, and they had me read one of my poems out loud. C left me alone with them for so long that I wondered if he knew what a date was. But the timing was right: I longed for the normalcy of this kind of plan, buying a six-pack of beer and heading to someone’s yard, petting dogs and meeting random neighbors and coworkers and friends of friends. I was so bored and lonely in L.A. that I would have rather gone to a barbecue than on a date.
That first date lasted for nearly twenty-four hours. I was immediately impressed that he could rent an entire house for himself and that he had maintained so many friendships for so long, attesting to how little anyone I had dated until then had had his shit together. He had poetry books on his shelves, which is easy to take as a sign. He later told me that he had ignored me on purpose at the barbecue, trying to gauge whether I could hold my own with his friends. He pointed to my success at this for our entire relationship as proof of my suitability for him. I wanted to tell him that this test of emotional strength was probably not only unkind but inaccurate. I was able to exist in his world as long as it felt like a game I was playing, one that reinforced the narrative of myself as able to fit in anywhere but belonging nowhere, privileged with a special separateness. It turns out this is the mental game many white women play in social (and societal) situations that they benefit from but are ambivalent about perpetuating. My trouble came when I realized that I was playing for keeps—or not playing at all but living my real, only life.
3.
Throughout her novels, Myles writes about the joys of playing everyday dress-up, wearing clothes that she finds at a party or in her mother’s attic. She relishes recounting the fashion trends of her high school years, Madras shirts and “tennis sweaters, and penny loafers (with Madras in the slots) and boat shoes and low Keds and bold striped teeshirts.” “I understood them in terms of uniforms because I went to Catholic schools,” she says of her childhood love of clothes, “and also I understood them in terms of codes.” When she describes the importance of performance in her work as an artist—first in poetry readings and later in writing plays and libretti—it feels like an extension of the same impulse. Performance and play are key to every cerebral work of queer theory of the past thirty years, but Myles makes it intuitive: performance is the mental games you play to entertain your friends and fight off existential boredom, which is why, for her, daily performance of identity and formal performances are not completely different. “Performance is spending,” Myles writes in Inferno, but she later amends it to “recording,” meaning that how we choose to act every moment we are awake is a way of paying attention.
She describes acting like a waitress when she is waiting tables, viewing it as a dress-up game or a performance project that reaffirms her true identity as a poet. The narrator of The Flamethrowers befriends a woman who tells her that she was an actress in Andy Warhol’s Factory films, but she became a waitress as a piece of performance art. “I began to like it,” she says, “the way it lent this air of tragedy to my so-called life.” She tells the narrator about the diner’s tacky decor, “my performance as a waitress, neon flashing into the room, making me feel as if I were living inside a film about a lonely woman who threw her life away to work in a diner. And I was that woman!” She also works as a prostitute, perhaps the only profession older than waitress. She makes the narrator think about how people negotiate double lives: How do you determine which one is your real life, the one whose truth arms you against the indignities of the second?
The narrator learns firsthand about the armor of identity: at the Salt Flats, she’s not a racer, but an artist posing as one. After Sandro betrays her in Italy, she joins a group of young Italian anarchists in Rome. At first she films her experience with the anarchists, but even after her camera is broken during a demonstration, she is still convinced she is there as an artis
t and not a political actor. The mediating, passive eye of the camera helps hush the question of her complicity. We often think of artists’ place in society as abrasive but neutral, there to witness and interpret, but not to participate. What a camera specifically does not capture is the person holding it, but we see the narrator as an accomplice in her ex-boyfriend’s brother’s murder clearly enough, as she aids his assassin’s getaway through the Alps.
In both beliefs and bullshit, conceptualism easily blurs from artistic movement to political movement and back again. At a party filled with artists, critics, and gallerists, the narrator meets one of the leaders of a fictionalized anarchist group called the Motherfuckers who occupied the Lower East Side in the sixties, fighting cops and providing for the people. They took part in both real and symbolic acts of insurrection, committing fake assassinations with guns loaded with blanks. Clicking the kaleidoscope once, these “assassinations” could appear as a kind of performance art. The artist and the anarchist interact with the world through an abstracted scrim: for artists it is the concept, for the anarchist it is ideology, although these identities don’t cleave in two that cleanly.
Describing her inspiration for The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner said that as she researched the New York art scene in the 1970s she was surprised to find “lots of guns, and lots of nude women.” She collected picture after picture of male artists posing with guns, using that one object to broadcast the working-class, Wild West, tough-guy aesthetic they ascribed to, as they rejected the feminine gentility of previous generations of artists. Kushner writes about the driving force behind conceptual art:
Art was now about acts not sellable; it was about gestures and bodies. It was freedom, a realm where a guy could shoot off his rifle. Ride his motorcycle over a dry lakebed. Put a bunch of stuff on the floor—dirt, for instance, or lumber. Drive a forklift into a museum, or a functional racecar.
In other words, seemingly radical art movements were based in part in the same retrograde idea of masculinity as the biker B movies that were popular at the exact same time.
But the nude women weren’t just macho accessories. They were performance artists. Artists like Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, and Marina Abramovic used their own naked bodies to comment on the ways society used them, in graphic performances with titles like Cut Piece and Rape Scene. Feminist performance art was an ingenious exploration of the market value of the female body: although women’s bodies are used to sell almost everything, through menial work and violence they are too often taken for cheap. Their work was an exploration of the performance required daily of all women. While men played at being outlaws with their guns, women played the parts given to them in order to survive.
I wasn’t required to wear a school uniform as a child, but I sometimes wore my own version anyway, a navy blue jumper I made my mother buy me at the Burlington Coat Factory. I played pretend in plain sight. When I was older, I imagined myself as a waitress in a movie to make food service tolerable. This was easier in Los Angeles where so many of the customers in this secret movie were played by actual movie stars.
Sometimes with C I felt like I was playing a part called “girlfriend,” a role I’d imagined myself in my whole life. And as I emerged from the desert of my loneliness, the things we did together were like a glowing mirage. We tried every restaurant in L.A., including one where dessert was a flash-frozen orb of ice cream that looked like a dinosaur egg. We stayed in a boutique hotel on the beach in Venice. We took a train to Santa Barbara and went wine tasting. We traveled to New York City to go to a music festival. All of this was possible, of course, because C made several times more money than I did. I wasn’t wrong that this life wasn’t completely mine, because it was only mine as long as I was his.
In a way, the relationship was like a trap, but it wasn’t the money that kept me there, as tempting as it is to paint myself like a Gothic heroine imprisoned in an evil lord’s estate. I was more driven by the desire to appear to others as a girlfriend, which to me meant a normal woman. I loved C, but sometimes I worried that it wasn’t the real me who loved him, but the girlfriend I was pretending to be. At the end of the summer, a few months after we started dating, I took a train up to Chico to see my aunt and uncle. C called me from a friend’s wedding to drunkenly tell me for the first time that he loved me. He said that he was with all of his friends, so many people he loved, and he wished I were there, too. This indicated to him that he must love me. At the time I was dissatisfied by this reasoning, because I thought he was failing to honor the specialness of romantic love. I had longed for him to say that he loved me, but this didn’t match my fantasy. Now I think the problem wasn’t the lack of romance, but that his confession felt too real, addressed as it was not to a girlfriend but to me, myself.
I read most of Brendan Koerner’s The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking at LAX and on an airplane, so many passages are imprinted fittingly in my memory with images of glassy airport terminals and the navy Naugahyde of plane seats. Once I saw its cover—blaring red, white, and blue, with two early seventies faces, a black man and a white woman, staring out from it—I knew it would be another link in the chain I started with The Flamethrowers. I had an intuition about terrorism’s relevance to the questions at hand, or maybe a belief that terrorism is relevant to everything.
The hijacking epidemic described in The Skies Belong to Us provides the perfect backdrop for the utter craziness and disillusionment of the era in which Eileen and Reno headed to New York, just after the shattered sixties. There were more than a hundred hijackings over the course of this bewildering fad, between 1961 and 1973. This crime appealed to the American (male) myth, weaponizing an emblem of modernity and freedom and promising ample institutional and media attention. It also engaged the American fantasy of getting something for nothing, be it a ransom or a trip to Cuba. Men of every age and ethnic group were susceptible to this fantasy, driven by a desire to reclaim their individual importance.
In fact it seems like the skyjacking wave encapsulated the marriage of optimism and nihilism that defines the American ego. Every hijacker believed that earning a stage from which to air his grievances would solve his personal problems and, if it did not, would cast him as a messianic figure, come to heal America’s soul. At the very least, they would be choosing action against gray passivity. One hijacker explained his crime by saying, “Oh, yeah, something had to be done—and I did something, for better or worse.” Hijacking was the last resort of people who would trade their freedom, even their lives, for a satisfying kind of self-expression, a chance to be the authors of their own stories, and there were many, many of those people in the United States.
These messianic fantasies were reinforced by the fact that a few hijackings succeeded by any measure. In 1969, an Italian immigrant hijacked planes all the way to Rome, where he was adored by the Italian public as both a teen idol and a folk hero. Then in 1972, a Mexican father of eight who had endured poverty and discrimination during his nineteen years living in the United States impulsively hijacked a plane and, instead of asking for ransom, requested that representatives of Los Angeles’s Spanish-speaking media gather for a press conference. His desperate, maundering speech to journalists made him an icon of the burgeoning Chicano movement. “This is for save my sons and your sons, too. I am trying to save America, to save the whole world, because we are all crazy. We are mad,” he told the pilot. Koerner writes that these hero hijackers “inadvertently tapped into a wellspring of rage.” The hijacking phenomenon abounded with victims of the United States’s sins of war and racism, wreaking havoc like vengeful ghosts. Many hijackers were disturbed veterans of the Vietnam War. In two separate cases, black residents of Detroit hijacked planes in order to protest the racism and corruption of the city’s police department.
Roger Holder, the architect of the most successful hijacking of the era, embodied many of the grievances curdling inside his country. As a child, Holder saw his family experience vicious rac
ism as the only black people in a small town in Oregon, then served several highly decorated (and severely traumatizing) tours in Vietnam. At the age of only nineteen, he was arrested for marijuana possession, court-martialed, and given the maximum sentence. He went AWOL and fled to San Diego, where he and his accomplice and girlfriend, a white California girl named Cathy Kerkow, were able to hijack planes all the way to Algeria to join a colony of exiled Black Panthers. After relations between the leftist regime in Algeria and the Black Panthers’ “International Section” went south, Holder and Kerkow were able to follow the Panthers to France, where, thanks to an impassioned lawyer, they were not extradited to the United States. Despite his freedom and fame in Paris—Holder and Kerkow’s social circle included Jean-Paul Sartre—Holder was racked by worsening mental illness and guilt over the twin daughters he had left in the United States. He experienced some of the struggles of black American expatriation that James Baldwin identified: that in order to achieve the kind of security one could not have in the United States, a black person must pay the price of complicity and self-hatred. As Baldwin wrote about Richard Wright, who lived in France for fifteen years,