When your work is historicized as Downtown, it sits inside vitrines or hangs on walls with captions that explain it briefly, often inadequately or quaintly. You—I—never see yourself or your contribution that way. I don’t know if it matters; my version will be countered by another’s. Maybe, as I still do when reading books about the past, people will view Downtown’s art and artifacts as escape, lesson, amusement, hope.
Still it’s implacably odd to know that lives function for others in uncontrollable ways. Historians can agree about an event’s occurrence and importance and dispute its interpretations forever. In the same club at the same time, people tell different tales about how the singer fell off the stage. These contestations engage now in then, in things that might have relevance. We don’t always know what’s relevant or what history teaches, but it affects us, anyway.
Downtown’s inventors contributed some generative, brilliant, and bold objects to consider today, still relevant, I think. And even flawed accounts reveal something about the past. We are all unreliable narrators, after all. Inevitably and maybe not unreasonably, the present will make its own terms with the past.
O is for Outlaw
The Boss of Bosses
Here’s my pet theory: Right after godfather Paul Castellano was gunned down in front of Sparks restaurant in December 1985, crack spread uncontrollably on New York streets. Castellano’s death, like Capone’s imprisonment in 1930, triggered mayhem: Wiseguys set out on their own with just enough venture capital and entrepreneurship to start doing business. Later John Gotti reined them in and restored a kind of disordered order. In the meantime, other gangs already in operation—Colombian and Chinese—cashed in on the disarray and brazenly branched out into new territory. There were freelancers, also, reveling in the Mob’s temporary glasnost.
Given my parti pris, I was curious to read Boss of Bosses—The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano, by Joseph F. O’Brien and Andris Kurins, if only to discover that Castellano had been the antidope La Casa Nostra pope. In the early 1980s Castellano dictated “Two Commandments”: “No one caught dealing drugs after 1962 . . . could ever become an initiated member of the Gambino family,” and “anyone caught dealing drugs, and whose activities in any way implicated other family members, would be whacked.” Before his death, some member of LCN were already dealing it, warily. Here were the seeds of discord. It was open season when he died.
One like to have one’s pet theories confirmed, which is precisely the level at which this cleverly constructed and predictable booklike docudrama operates. Everyone’s predigested versions of the Mob and the FBI are once again trotted down the aisle, a fashion show of mediated wisdoms. Written in short chapters, or scenes, Boss of Bosses is the script for the movie of Boss of Bosses. O’Brien and Kurins score points with the premise that the Mob learns its line and gestures from movies and book about the Mafia. Their book does too. Reading it one can actually sense representations building one upon another, piling up into mountains of images and words, to create what seems like “real life.”
Boss of Bosses recounts the Paul Castellano reign, as told by the FBI men who were responsible for bugging his Staten Island residence and bringing about his fall: An indictment by the government and assassination by Gotti’s men. To execute the placement of Gotti’s men. To execute the placement of the listening device took months of planning. As the authors humbly put it, “A more crucial quarter-hour would be difficult to locate in all the annals of the fight against organized crime in America.” In that 15 minutes the FBI invaded the Castellano residence and wired his kitchen, where he did most of his business.
O’Brien and Kurins report what “O’Brien and Kurins” had to do in order to get inside. In the third person, they reconstruct their dialogues with one another and their superiors, which set in motion the invasion of the godfather’s mansion. In reverential detail, they relate how Paul Castellano came to be Boss of Bosses, how his particular brand of wisdom served him well and moved him up the ranks. But there wouldn’t be a story without an equally reverential analysis of his fall: He was complacent and out of touch in Staten Island; he wasn’t watching his troops; he was home, because he was sexually obsessed with his Colombian mistress/maid, Gloria Olarte; and worst of all he kicked out his wife, Nina, violating the code any reasonable Mafia chieftain obeyed.
To make the story worthy of being read or filmed, O’Brien and Kurins must construe the Boss and themselves as bigger than life; otherwise they might look too little on the screen. The FBI’s bringing in some businessman who heads an illegal corporation isn’t as thrilling as bringing in, say, a tragic hero. “Of all recent Mob Bosses, he had the most self-discipline, the most restraint. He kept his ego out of his businesses. He did not make the kind of mistakes—mistakes that generally sprang from character flaws rather than mere tactical misjudgment—that precipitously brought down other Dons. The more impressive Big Paul’s track record became, the more he began to haunt the imaginations of certain Special Agents. He was growing into a figure worthy of obsession.”
From the FBI agents’ point of view, Castellano’s obsession with Gloria is central to his downfall. Castellano had been impotent since 1976—”ironically, the same year he became the omnipotent Godfather. The disability apparently had not greatly bothered him until the Colombian maid entered his life.” From the tapes they learn that he will undergo an operation—a penile implant—to be able to have intercourse with her, a source of sly humor throughout the book. Gloria is a troubling, salacious punchline, a dirty joke that messes with Big Paul’s mind. The writers ask what they think is the Mob’s question: “Why did he indulge this crude, sharp-tongued unglamorous woman, this foreigner with her accent and her appalling table manners?” But in their words, she’s just a hole: “‘You wait and see,’ said Andy Kurins. ‘He’s following that metal dick of his into a cold and lonely place.’” The special agents’ “obsession” with the Boss must never be thought of as sexual. A sprinkling of misogynist dialogue and some innuendoes about Gloria function to separate the men from each other.
When they bust him, Kurins and O’Brien given Castellano respect. They allow him time to change into his suit; they don’t cuff him in front of his family. On another day, bringing him to court, they escort him to the Second Avenue Deli, for his favorite—a corned beef sandwich on rye. After months of surveillance, the FBI agents are sad to take him in; they’ve come to like the Godfather. Passing Castellano over to the marshals “they felt strangely like they were giving the bride away at a wedding.”
In the current exposition of cops and robbers, everyone is the hero, and everyone the antihero. Besides, if the supposed bad guys don’t have stature, the good guys look bad. Castellano has to be heroic, for if he isn’t, what are the FBI guys? Just a couple of antihero-worshipping G-men, playing with an underworld figure’s civil rights.
The Real McCoy
From the universe of possible reasons for a book’s going out of print, there might be collected an anthology in cultural politics, with a chapter for “unpopular culture.” One could imagine Horace McCoy there, as all his work is OP, even his famous-for-a-minute Depression-era marathon dance novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), which returned to print, briefly, with the movie of the same name. Collectors know a real find: McCoy’s I Should Have Stayed Home, sitting in a used bookstore on a dusty shelf, positioned somewhere between Precious and Obscure Oblivion. My paperback copy’s cover proclaims it “Hard-boiled,” “Perverse,” “shockingly Brutal.”
The hard-boiled McCoy, if he was—we can’t know the real McCoy—might have appreciated his oblivion. Cynicism and despair suffuse his novels, and a sad literary fate might have satisfied his pessimism. In its darkness the hard-boiled school previewed film noir; in its cool toughness it rehearsed the next war and constructed future Cold Warriors. McCoy’s writing is also self-conscious and reflexive—modernist—showing the influences of Hemingway and even Stein. His lean, taut style serves the g
enre, but what’s interesting about his novels is their mix of literary forms. His work is not easy to categorize.
I Should Have Stayed Home appeared in 1938. Hitler was threatening Europe, and the U.S. was slowly moving out of the depression, from isolationism toward war. This is the novel’s time; its location, Hollywood—the Hollywood of extras. McCoy’s truly marginal characters are drawn there by the movie world’s promise of fame and fortune, not unlike Steinbeck’s Okies in Of Mice and Men, who also went West hoping for salvation.
Ambitious antihero Ralph Carston wants it all, but his conscience and idealism stand in the way. Roommate Mona is much more stalwart. The novel begins with her and their mutual friend, Dorothy, going to jail; Dorothy for shoplifting. Mona for objecting loudly, in court, to Dorothy’s sentence. Mona’s disappearance into jail sets Ralph adrift, and he descends into the abyss: “Feeling the way I did, alone and friendless, with the future very black, I didn’t want to get out on the streets and see what the sun had to show me, a cheap town filled with cheap stores and cheap people, like the town I had left, identically like any one of ten thousand other small towns in the country—not my Hollywood, not the Hollywood you read about.”
Temptation enters Ralph the extra’s life in the guise of an older woman. Mrs. Smithers is “filthy” rich with all the best movie connections. Embellishing this filthiness is how she takes her pleasure—she loves getting slapped around by gigolos. McCoy uses the novel’s filmic context by having Mrs. Smithers seduce Ralph with pornographic home movies. Ralph succumbs, not quickly, not completely, and not, finally, successfully—he doesn’t get a part but he also doesn’t ever give up. And throughout the novel, Mona, as chorus or superego, warns him against Mrs. Smithers and himself; the two extras’ dialogues construct a kind of argument about how far and how much are okay in the pursuit of success.
Relatively plotless, though replete with the genre’s dark mayhem—suicide, court scenes, jail for Ralph—the story is primarily a journey, Ralph’s making his way, or not making it, in the world. In this Pilgrim’s Progress, the hero’s struggle is not with God and the devil but with the secular world. McCoy uses Hollywood as the paradigm, the apotheosis, of capitalist society at a time when the myth of Horatio Alger was becoming a maudlin and corroded irony.
Ralph’s battle with his own corruption and loss of principle is key to McCoy’s work generally. His protagonists fight the good fight. In I Should Have Stayed Home, Mona refuses to be interviewed by fan magazines and rails against them for creating false and insatiable longings. A friend of Mona’s, Johnny Hill, who does publicity for a studio, quits his job because a German consul was able to have censored a part of a movie in which “German youngsters [are] drilled as soldiers.”
Then, in the reflexive mode, Johnny announces to Mona and Ralph that he’s going to write a novel about Hollywood’s extras—“the true story of this town concerns people like you—a girl like you and a boy like him. Maybe I’ll put you two in a book . . . Understand I don’t think I’ve got any special talent for novel writing.” Ralph-in-Hollywood is McCoy’s meditation on desire and failure. Through failure may now be the unspeakable of our society, in the midst of the Depression it was an existential fact of life. McCoy’s Hollywood is the nightmare machine that produces phonies, monsters and wasted youth, sadness and sadism. He sees failure embedded within the system; there will always be people who don’t make it.
McCoy’s version of cultural politics is, like the country he’s from, contradictory. There’s some “conventional” racism, homophobia and misogyny side by side with sympathy for the underdog and hope for a nationwide new deal. Contemporary “conventional” attitudes are as questionable but more difficult to isolate from the narratives—ideologies—that we live. It seems easier to spot offensive or questionable ideas in work from earlier periods, in part because language and style change. Concepts such as “underdog” and “phony” may seem dated in today’s parlance and in our nation, as presidents wrap themselves in symbols and commit highly unsymbolic HUD and S&L frauds. And get away with it. It’s banal now even to say that corruption is endemic when many are positioned as permanent underdogs, the underclass.
Reading the out-of-print McCoy returns one to the not-so-distant past and to another consciousness. McCoy’s sometimes uncomfortable speeches, prejudices and “old-fashioned” language bespeak the U.S.’s disturbed history, its citizens’ noble and ignoble values. His writing style itself speaks a very American language, presaging the Beats; long flowing sentences and a moody lyricism alternate with terse, plain speech. Like other American writers from the Transcendentalists on, McCoy eulogizes a disappearing America, its hometowns and daily life transformed by powerful economic and social forces. Hard-boiled despair is personal, political and unpopular. But given our economy, McCoy’s lessons on living with failure might come in handy.
Guide for the Misbegotten
In his novella Tonio Kröger, Thomas Mann writes, “Only a beginner believes those who create feel.” Kroger is a young middle-class German who considers himself manqué both as a bourgeois and as an artist. John Waters might be the anti-Kröger—a well-off, middle-class man whose life and art mock high, low, middle and all their fuzzy gradations. He’s an aesthete and an anti-aesthete; he’s classy and classless. Filmmaker, artist, writer, actor, Waters revels in spectacle and spectatorship; and the joys of making, being and observing fill the pages of Role Models, his 2010 collection of essays. In Mann’s terms, Waters might be that rare creature: An artist who feels.
Early in his career, Waters became known for films depicting bizarre characters in outrageous, super-melodramatic situations, as in Desperate Living (1977), a gay/lesbian/cross-dressing murder fantasy set in Mortville, a circuslike shantytown. Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque nicely fits these films. A contemporary Lewis Carroll, Waters luxuriates in the topsy-turviness of life, and his somewhat more conventional recent films depend, like most narratives, on the reversal of fortune. In Pecker (1998), the eponymous protagonist flees instant New York art-world stardom when his photographs of Baltimore buddies and family subject them to unwanted and unsympathetic attention. What dances on the surface in this and other Waters films is explicit in Role Models: a concern for art, fun, justice and people.
The essays recount actual and imaginary encounters with ordinary but extraordinary people, as well as with celebrities such as Little Richard and 1950s crooner Johnny Mathis. Their stories, intermingled with Waters’ own, comprise a kind of bildungsroman, or even a portrait of the artist as a collage of his influences. Take the chapter on Mathis, which kicks off the book. “I wish I were Johnny Mathis,” Waters confesses. “So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect.” None of these qualities characterizes Waters’ own oeuvre; but as he himself asks, “Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites . . ?” Waters once chanced to see the elusive Mathis but didn’t have the nerve to talk to him, and then felt compelled to interview his undoppelgänger. “[Mathis’s] appeal is broad and wide, something I could never achieve and he can never escape.”
Thinking about the singer, Waters travels down memory lane and unearths other boyhood heroes, like Clarabell, the clown on TV’s Howdy Doody Show, played by Bob Keeshan, later Captain Kangaroo. “Imagine his life, his schizophrenia,” Waters writes of Keeshan. “Am I Clarabell? Or Captain Kangaroo?” It was Clarabell whose clownish makeup would inspire Divine—Waters’s apotheosis and star, the drag-queen actor featured in many of his films, first celebrated in Pink Flamingos (1972) for eating actual dog shit on a Baltimore street. Au revoir, good taste, Waters sings, and good riddance.
Role Models pays homage to Baltimore, Waters’s muse and hometown, whose culture spawned many magnificent oddballs, as well as the bars and barkeeps who nursed his imagination. In the chapter “Baltimore Heroes,” Waters writes, “The good [bars] have no irony about them. They’re not ‘faux’ anything. They’re real and alarming.” He gravitates toward characters like Esther, a fierce, bad mothe
r with a filthy mouth who slings whiskey and fears nothing, and Lady Zorro, “an angry stripper with a history of physical and sexual abuse with a great body and the face of a man.” Waters reflects: “To this day Zorro is my inspiration. . . . Brave. Without makeup. Like Tilda Swinton at the Oscars.”
Though irony is mother’s milk to him, Waters’s quest for genuine communication inside bullshit-free zones propels him toward worlds with and without irony. Sincerely insincere, insincerely sincere, authentically inauthentic, inauthentically authentic, his work vexes the normative and all the usual binaries. Oppositional terms can’t tell the stories he wants to tell. The mash-up of in-betweenness sparks Waters’s imagination, where insincerity can be sincere, sincerity ironic. Waters prodigiously exaggerates the deficiencies of false dichotomies: Each side of the aisle is desperately wanting. All this ongoing worry about “authenticity” in art and life, his oeuvre suggests, is moot, since human beings may be incapable of inauthenticity. Con artist Bernie Madoff’s commission of fraud doesn’t make Madoff a fraud: He’s absolutely Madoff.
In this vein, Waters prefers second-rate to first—Jayne Mansfield to Marilyn Monroe, “bad” Tennessee Williams to “good” Williams—but he also cherishes Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, one of the great American novels of the twentieth century, and the work of Denton Welch and Christina Stead. He’s a big reader, a bookworm. “I’ve jitterbugged with Richard Serra, eaten Thanks-giving dinner with Lana Turner . . . gone out drinking with Clint Eastwood . . . but what I like best is staying home and reading.”
What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Page 16