by Dale Peck
Still, some similarities were visible, which time has only served to highlight. The return of/reinvention of parataxis (in lieu of what Robert Glück called the “La Brea Tar Pits of lyricism”) the shift in narrative focus from institutions (marriage, corporations, the military) to individuals, above all the insistence on constricting consciousness to its physical container: to the body, whose movements and sensations didn’t exactly circumscribe the self, but nevertheless made it possible, and meaningless in any other context. This is a literature of the flesh: of its shifting loci of pleasure and pain, as Foucault, uncoupling sexuality from Freudian pathologies, labeled them; of its frailties; of its futile but inevitable gestures toward transcendence. Lynne Tillman: “This is a Herculean task never before recorded. An adventure with my body. In forever.” Raymond Carver: “The body is still unidentified, unclaimed, apparently unmissed.” Jim Lewis: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” The language echoes metaphysics but the context is always (comically, banally, painfully) concrete: a woman attempting to remove a diaphragm; a news account of a body found in a river; a man who’s shot himself in the foot. Depending on how you interpret it—and this is the work’s genius, the closest it comes to universality—its obsession with the body is either a capitulation to the Cartesian construct of the head in the tank or an absolute rejection of it. Which is to say: the new writers suffered from the same postmodern anxieties about the epistemological relationship between the self and the world as had the post-war generation, but they didn’t allow that to derail an engagement with the information delivered by the senses, only to temper any conclusions at which they might (seem to) arrive. John Keene: “Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape, solidified like a well-mixed mâché, and thus, upon rereading them he realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice. The final dances of youth, dim incandescence. Willow weep for me. And so, patient reader, these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations.”
Notes maybe, but notes to, for, from life—real life, life-as-it-is-lived, and not the beginning-middle-end stuff that fiction had always insisted on, as if life were a sculpture on its plinth rather than a gas drifting through, merging with, the void. This was a literature that engaged with time more honestly than any that had come before. Most writing concerns itself with the relationship of the present to the past and the future. This was a literature of moments. Of successive moments, because the forward flow of time is inexorable, but not necessarily linked moments: if one action followed another, the first action wasn’t always depicted as causal—even if, say, the second action was death from AIDS and the first was unprotected sex with an HIV-positive person. Hence what Dennis Cooper referred to as a “widespread disbelief in a future and a refusal to learn from the past,” which observation served as a kind of psycho-social barometer for most of my early career. Yet this anomie was balanced by what Robert Glück described as a need to “convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself.” The most urgent of these “meanings” undoubtedly concerned the AIDS crisis, which was to the Blank Generation what World War I was to the Lost Generation. AIDS disproportionately affected people who fell into one or another disenfranchised minority, which was widely perceived as the reason behind the Reagan administration’s criminally sluggish response to the epidemic. But it was more than that. AIDS was a medical crisis, and a political one, but it was also existential, because if anything united the diverse members of the counterculture, it was sex. From the litany of lovers in Lynne Tillman’s “Weird Fucks” or Susan Minot’s “Lust” to the gritty pornography of Gary Indiana’s “Sodomy,” the neonatal voyeurism of Suzanne Gardinier’s “How Soft, How Sweet,” or the inculcation of shame in Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” copulation was almost always a liminal experience, the lens through which the artifice of identity could be seen most clearly. “He used sex as a means of communicating,” Sam D’Allesandro writes in “Giovanni’s Apartment”: “I need sex as a way to get into heaven.” Or Sarah Schulman in After Delores: “She saw something special in me. She trusted me. And I was transformed suddenly from a soup-stained waitress to an old professor.” Perhaps the only feeling more pervasive than alienation from the revanchist ethos of Reagan’s ’80s was the refusal to succumb to it, to validate it or accept its judgments. Writers found strength in the very traits that had been used to vilify them and, fertilized by desire and fear and determination, a new literature flourished in the tiny spaces between courage and despair.
The ’90s ruined everything, of course. The boom went on so long it produced a generation that believes it can have whatever it wants. Liberal or conservative, aesthete or infidel: identity and ideology don’t have to inconvenience anyone anymore. You can vote against gay marriage and pay your gay hairdresser $500 to cut your hair like Ellen Page’s. You can espouse environmentalism but still drive an SUV and jet off to India or the Caribbean for vacation. You don’t have to choose between Björk and Beyoncé, between the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley: you can have it all. Even now, when the go-go ’90s are a distant memory, the prevailing ethos seems to be “Get what you can” (or maybe “Get it while you can”) and this is just as true in literature as it is in the rest of life. The fractured antirealisms of the 1980s were supplanted by a recidivist postmodernism even as an ever-assimilationist realism tied its fortunes to politically expedient notions of identity, a lose/lose development that reduced the aggressive insecurities of ’80s alt-lit to easy ironies or even easier pieties. What I mean is, the stories in this anthology aren’t just a corrective to the excesses of the Reagan-Bush era. They’re an admonition to ours as well.
It should be said, though, that the goal of this anthology isn’t to define a canon or a school, only to dismantle one—or two, or three, or a dozen. The parameters of what remains are as idiosyncratic as its writers; as its readers. It starts, by one measure, with Baldwin and Becket and Burroughs, and ends with Bolaño, Didion, Ferrante, Knausgard, Sebald. By another measure it starts with the first line of Brad Gooch’s “Spring”: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there,” and ends with the last line of David Wojnarowicz’s “Spiral”: “I am disappearing but not fast enough.” It starts with Dorothy Allison’s “I tell the stories and it comes out funny,” and ends with Amy Hempel’s “She wants my life.” It starts with Gil Cuadros’s “Thoughts of the world seem woven of thread, thinly disguised, a veil,” and ends with Rebecca Brown’s “Above the crowded street, the hospital, you fly.” “Her body feels like someone else’s,” writes Suzanne Gardinier: “As she lies there with her head on my father’s chest she admits for several seconds that it feels like a prison, in which she must serve out the term of her life.”
“In that extended instant after sex,” Christopher Bram observes, “before you remember you are not alone, I felt pleased with myself and the life I lived.”
“Out in the snowy East of Long Island,” Kevin Killian answers, “I bent over Frank O’Hara’s grave and traced his words with my tongue, the words carved into his stone there: ‘Grace to be born and to live as variously as possible.’”
“But then the war came,” Gary Indiana writes, “which ended a good deal one might have looked forward to.”
“Looking back on it,” Mary Gaitskill sums everything up, “I don’t know why that time was such a contented one, but it was.”
A note on chronology: Decades only rarely oblige the calendar by confining themselves to their numerical delineation (perhaps reflected in our perverse insistence that they start in the tenth year of their predecessor, and end in their ninth). The stories in this anthology were all either written or published between 1980 and 1992, which is to say, the Reagan-Bush years, which seem to me to form a cohesive period in American culture, markedly different from the 1970s (which didn’t really start until the fall of Saigon and Nixon’s resignation) and
the Clinton ’90s, when the genuine prosperity of the boom years succeeded in commodifying aesthetics in a way that Reaganomics never could. I apologize if my title misled anyone, but what can I say? The Soho Press Book of Short Fiction from 1980–1992 is no one’s idea of sexy.
Weird Fucks
A Novella in 13 Chapters
by Lynne Tillman
chapter 1: There’s a Snake in the Grass
I’m on my way, one of four NYC college girls, heading for Bar Harbor, Maine, to spend the summer as a chambermaid, waitress, or piano player. Bar Harbor is on Mt. Desert Island, linked with the mainland by one bridge only and, we are warned, if there is a fire, we might all be caught on the island. Only two lanes out, they caution in dour Maine tones, and the only way out.
Bar Harbor is full of Higginses. There are three branches of the family, no one branch talking to the other two. We took rooms in Mrs. Higgins’ Guest House. Willy Higgins, a nephew to whom she didn’t speak, fell in love with me. He was the town beatnik, an artist with a beard and bare feet. He would beat at the door at night and wake all four of us. I’d leave the bedroom Hope and I shared to be embraced by this impassioned island painter who would moan, “I even love your dirty feet.”
I was in love with Johnny. Johnny was blond and weak, his mother an alcoholic since his father died some years back. Johnny drove a custom-built racing car which had a clear plastic roof. He was a society boy.
The days for me were filled with bed-making and toilet-cleaning. I watched the motel owner make passes at women twice my age who couldn’t read. We had doughnuts together at six a.m. I would fall asleep on the beds I tried to make.
At night Hope would play cocktail piano in bars and I’d wait for Johnny. Mrs. Higgins watched our comings and goings and spoke in an accent I’d now identify as cockney. She might have been on the front porch the night Johnny picked me up in his mother’s station wagon. We drove to the country club in the middle of the night and parked in the rough behind a tree. We made love on the front seat of the car. I actually thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He asked me to put my arms around him again. He whispered in my ear that, although he knew many people, he didn’t have many friends. He asked if I minded making love again. This would be my third time.
The rich boys who were sixteen and devoted to us NYC girls robbed a clothes store in Northeast Harbor. They brought the spoils to our apartment. Michael, a philosophy student and the boyfriend of one of us, insisted the stuff be returned within twenty-four hours or else he’d call the cops. The next night Bill returned the tartan kilts and Shetland sweaters that hadn’t been missed. But he dropped his wallet in the store while bringing it all back and somehow or other the cops were at our door the night after. They spotted me as the ringleader. We went to Bangor for our trial and got fined $25 each as accessories. They called it a misdemeanor. The newspaper headline read Campus Cuties Pull Kilt Caper. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer anyway, I thought.
Johnny never called back again. I dreamed that Mrs. Higgins and I were in her backyard. I pointed to a spot in the uncut lawn and said with alarm: There’s a snake in the grass.
A guy who hawked at carnivals wanted me to join the circus and run away with him. I was coming down from speed and learning to drink beer. Some nights we’d go up Cadillac Mountain and watch the sunrise. Bar Harbor is the easternmost point in America, the place where the sun rises first. I pined away the summer for Johnny and just before heading back to NYC heard that his mother had engaged him to a proper society girl.
CHAPTER 2: An East Village Romance
I was a slum goddess and in college. He looked something like Richard Burton; I resembled Liz. It was, in feeling, as crummy and tortured as that.
George had a late-night restaurant on St. Marks Place. I’d go in there with Hope, my roommate; we’d drink coffee, eat a hamburger. Fatal fascination with G behind the counter—his sex hidden but not his neck, his eyes, his shoulders. He called me “Little One.” “Little One,” he’d say, “why are you here? What do you want?” I’d sit at the counter with hot coffee mug in hand, unable to speak, heart located in cunt, inarticulate.
José was George’s best friend and George had a Greek wife who was not around. The guys and I hung out together. $1 movies at the Charles. Two-way conversations between artists (they were both sculptors) while I hung, sexually, in the air. José had a red beard, George had no beard, just grayish skin in the winter. “Little One,” he’d say, “what do you want?” He’d trace a line on my palm as if it were a map of my intentions.
Still, with so much gray winter passion, no fucking. Night after night, nights at the counter, count the nights. I met his wife who dried her long black Greek hair in the oven. They are separated. It is a recent separation and I am passionately uncaring. I am in love. I take trips with other people to places I can’t remember. I spend hours talking with an older woman called Sinuway who gives me a mirror to remind me I am beautiful. She disappears.
José reminisced about the fifties when beatniks roamed the streets. In those days George made sidewalk drawings. One time José recounted, “George was very drunk—very drunk, heh George—and drawing a young girl’s portrait. For hours and hours because he’d fallen asleep behind the easel, his face blocked by the paper. Remember, George?” Stories like these passed the time. Weeks passed.
George, José and I were in George’s room and José put a ring on my finger then left the room. George and I were alone. He undressed me and put his hand on the place between my breasts. He undressed me in the doorway and fucked me. It went fast after so many weeks, like a branch breaking off a tree. The time had come. It was a snap.
“I want to write a poem,” he said, his cock still hard. “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said, dressing as fast as I could. I wanted to be indifferent, not to burden him with my lack of sophistication. He had an ugly look on his face. Perhaps he was thinking about his recently separated wife drying her hair in the oven while he fucked a young woman.
Back at St. Marks Place I headed home, thinking this might be a reason for suicide. All that time, the perfunctory fuck, that poem he would write. It was all over. I phoned Susan who still lived at home; her life wasn’t plagued with late-night restaurants. “What would you do,” I asked. “Forget it,” she said, “it’s not important.”
Later that night Hope and I went out again and I met Bill. He traced a line from my palm up my wrist all the way to my elbow.
CHAPTER 3: A Very Quiet Guy
Bill and I left Hope and went to the Polish Bar not four doors from George’s late-night restaurant. Beer ten cents a glass. We drank and drank; I told Hope I’d be home soon and wasn’t.
Somehow we were upstairs in somebody’s loft. Bill had red hair and brown eyes. He was very tall and wore a flannel shirt. We made love all night long, this kind of sleepless night reassuring. His rangy body and not much talking. He’d keep tracing that line from my palm to my elbow, the inner arm. He disarmed me. It was easy to do.
Early morning at the B&H dairy restaurant, our red faces like Bill’s hair. Breakfast with the old Jews in that steamy bean and barley jungle. Romance in the East Village smelled like oatmeal and looked like flannel shirts. Our smell in the smell of the B&H. George and José walk in and it was a million years ago, those weeks of gray passion and one snappy fuck. Sitting with Bill, so easily read, I smile at them. George looks guilty and embarrassed. I feel wanton and he is history.
Bill and I started to go together. He told me about his wife from whom he was separated. She was on the other coast. That seemed like a real separation. Bill was quiet and often sat in a corner. I thought he was just thinking. I introduced Michael, the first hippie I knew, to Nancy, my best friend. We spent New Year’s together on 42nd Street, Nancy kissed a cop, the guys pissed on the street and Michael pissed in the subway.
Bill and I started a fur eyeglass-case-making operation which I was sure would catch on
. We convinced Charley, owner of the fur store on St. Marks Place, that those scraps of fur would make great eyeglass cases. A fur sewing machine was rented and placed in the basement of the fur store. Bill and I passed nights sitting side by side, silently, in old fur coats, stitching up cases which never did get sold. Bill grew more and more quiet.
My father had his first heart attack. The subways were on strike and I took long walks to Mt. Sinai in my fur coat to visit my father in the intensive care unit. The first night he was in the hospital I couldn’t go home. I slept on the couch at Nancy’s mother’s apartment. In the morning Nancy stood by the couch, anxious because the sheet covered me completely, like a shroud, and she wondered how I could breathe.
One night Bill fucked me with energy. Spring was coming and so was his wife, he told me later. I stormed out of the fur store, yelling that I would never see him again, and fumed to the corner where I stood, having nowhere to go. That fuck was premeditated—wife here tomorrow, do it tonight. I turned back and returned to Bill and Michael who said, “We knew you’d be back. You’re too smart for that.”
We went to Nancy’s and suddenly I was sick, throwing up in her mother’s toilet bowl. Bill held my head, my hair. He took me to my apartment and made me oatmeal. Left me propped up in bed with a pile of blankets and coats over me. Three days later, I awoke, my flu over.
His wife had a beautiful voice and was as tall as he was. And while I could get him out of my system, he couldn’t get out of the system. He didn’t want to resist the draft; he desperately wanted to pass the tests, especially the mental test. When he received his notice telling him he was 1-A, he tried to kill himself. Slit his wrists. Last time I remember seeing him he was sitting in an antique store, rocking, near the window. We waved to each other.