by Jarett Kobek
DECEMBER 1993
Dorian Corey
New Year’s Eve is only another stitch in the great tapestry of distant drug memories, but I’m positive that I wasted my evening in a dismal club. Eyes blasted, nose aching, chemical drip leaching into the back of my throat. Christmas is the same. Only blurry intimations of jingling bells and Salvation Army Santa Clauses.
My memory of the period is very spotty. And not because of my chemical intake. The drugs goofed up my memory, sure, but the writing was way worse.
The more that I vomited out words, the less that my own life maintained its texture, the less that I remembered of my daily existence. My brain couldn’t juggle two realities, couldn’t maintain its focus, so I plunged further into the world that paid the bills, into the world that kept me rent stabilized.
Of that entire holiday season, only one thing stands out. A headline that ran in either the New York Post or Newsday: DRAG QUEEN LEFT MUMMY BEHIND.
The queen in question, Dorian Corey, died in August. She was famous. You may remember her from the documentary Paris Is Burning. You may not.
For something like twenty years, Dorian designed clothes for other ballroom queens from her apartment on West 140th Street. When she croaked, another victim of AIDS, her friend Lois Taylor inherited the wardrobe. The glory and the glitter. Word got around that if people needed outré outfits, they should get in touch with Lois.
Two straight guys asked Lois if Dorian’s apartment might hold a black cape. They were going to a Halloween party, and one of them wanted to dress like Dracula. Lois said, sure, honey, come and take a look. She let them explore the bedroom-sized closet. Lois saw a bag on the floor, beneath an orange dress. She tried to lift the bag. It was too heavy. One of the men cut the bag with a pair of scissors, releasing a boggy stench.
—What is this? asked the guy. A dead dog?
And here the story goes Only in New York. One of the men identified himself as a cop. Consider that. Consider a straight cop digging through a queen’s closet in Harlem, looking for a cape because he wanted to dress up like Dracula.
Anyhoo, guess what he found?
A mummified body wrapped in naugahyde. Through a disgusting process, which involved cutting the fingers off at the second knuckles, injecting them with a special solution, slipping the skin off the bone, and finally, a police technician wearing the fingertips like a glove, the corpse was identified.
Bobby Wells a/k/a Bobby Worley, born 1938. Arrested for rape in 1963. Last seen in 1968. It’s possible that Dorian lived with his body for twenty-five years.
The club kids were crazy with the mummy. Who could blame them? Michael Alig loved it, couldn’t stop talking about Dorian. It was the weirdest story in a long time, the old striking out against the new, a reminder that even with growing gentrification and the reign of Mayor Rudy Über Alles, the city remained the most bizarre place on earth.
A mummy in a drag queen’s closet! So perfect. So New York. So beyond my imaginative powers as a writer.
—Educate me about this fucking mummy, Parker said over the telephone. Give me the scoop on Dorian Corey.
I made up a story about how Dorian charged admission to see the corpse. Back in the early ’80s, when things were bleak. She only asked for five dollars. The lie satisfied Parker. More gossip to throw in his colleagues’ faces. The inside scoop. The real deal.
I only hoped that he wouldn’t end up the fool, bloviating about nothing. But who would challenge him? People in publishing were afraid of Parker.
He was big and he was abusive.
And he was my main man.
Parker transformed my pages into cash money, keeping me in my coffers. In this arena, none of his many efforts had matched the feat of optioning Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle to the Hollywood director/ producer Alan J. Pakula.
When Pakula first started sniffing around, I rented several of his films. The best was All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford at the height of his beauty. Robert Redford was gorgeous. I couldn’t get over it. I ended up renting The Candidate, a slightly earlier film where his face radiates off the celluloid, his very image imprinted upon the human brain.
All the President’s Men featured two-time Academy Award winner Jason Robards in the role of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Robards made me think of Adeline, of the time that he took her to Serendipity III. Not that I needed any excuse to think of Adeline. I thought about Adeline every stupid day.
I told Brickley that if Pakula wanted the book, and if Pakula would fork over a ridiculous chunk of change, then, please, Parker Brickley, take your twenty percent. Set up the deal. I needed the cash.
Pakula’s largesse bought an incredible luxury. It gave me free time. I quit my job at Theatre 80. Partly because I’d been blessed with the imprimatur of Hollywood, Parker was able to negotiate a much bigger advance on the next book.
That’s the one that nearly killed me.
JANUARY 1994
Baby Attends the Launch for Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time
Despite it being an explicit work of science fiction, Parker had convinced Michael Kandel to publish Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle with the trade dress of a literary novel. Books are like pastry. Presentation is everything.
My trite SFisms about the future and gene splicing and robots, written with the sorry earnestness of youth, were misconceived as dense metaphorical allegories about present-day society. I stopped being a geek interested in spaceships. I became a postmodernist.
Most reviewers situated Trapped within a trend of new literary works encompassing the outward aesthetics of genre fiction. Comparisons included Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. A sizeable minority rejected this review, believing it closer to the nihilit of Bret Easton Ellis. My favorite review appeared in The Houston Chronicle. This minor masterpiece suggested a link between the elephantine appearance of Michelle Gila and the Hindu god Ganesha, reading my novel as a substrata retelling of Vedic literature. Michelle Gila was the new remover of obstacles, swiping away the world’s troubles with his synthcoke-encrusted trunk.
The Voice Literary Supplement asked for an interview. I said yes, which was a mistake, as the resulting article did not increase sales one iota but made common knowledge of my residency in Manhattan. I would have preferred my location to have been a mystery, going so far as to claim in my biographical blurbs that I was a fishmonger in London’s East End.
But the secret was out. I started receiving invitations to launches and readings. Even worse, I started saying yes.
The very first outing that I attended was held at Nell’s.
When I started clubbing, Nell’s emanated an aura of a mystic world where yuppies and aging veterans shelled out ridiculous amounts of money on food and alcohol and high-grade cocaine. There’d never been any reason to go into Nell’s.
When I did get inside, my name on the list, I didn’t talk to anyone. I stood in a corner and watched as a group of women in their late thirties decayed into shrieking laughter.
For someone who haunted clubs, I’d made an inexcusable mistake.
What’s the first rule? Never arrive alone.
So I drafted Regina. She feigned disinterest, but as soon as I brought her to a party where we watched Jay McInerney crying into a frozen water-melon, she engaged with the concept.
When we attended the launch of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time, I had my first encounter with that fat little fuck Norman Mailer. The old fruit-cake stood at the bar, eyes agog at every broad in the joint, drooling in his senescent lust. Every inch the pompous ass. I watched from across the room until I was distracted by the cackling of Nan Talese.
The year previous, I’d inhaled Mailer’s work, first picking up a cheap paperback of The Armies of the Night. It was the best book that I’d read in a long time. It hooked me on the rest of his stuff. Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The Fight. The Executioner’s Song. Of a Fire on the Moon. Even Marilyn! All remarkable, all incredible!
But nothing about Mailer’s writing made me want to meet the man. If nothing else, future societies will prize my ability to separate artist from art.
Regina went to the bar, with no recognition of the little troll beside her. She ordered a drink. Mailer scummed up against her. I saw his withered claw on her bare shoulder. I let out an audible gasp and stomped over.
—Come on, I said, taking Regina by the arm.
—Listen, sweetheart, said Norman Mailer, you aren’t the person who’ll decide whether or not she’s leaving.
—I hold a great deal of respect for your work, Mr. Mailer, I said, but you had best say a prayer to your gods if you still think this is 1967 and your headbutting can help you. You aren’t dealing with a Harvard faggot who’ll wilt beneath the stench of your testosterone. I’m molten lava and you’re smoldering embers left over from a long-extinguished fire. I’m a butterfly and a bee.
—Baby, said Regina, what the hell are you talking about?
—I’m talking about beating this old man like a dusty broom, I said.
I yanked her away. Norman Mailer never said a word. I suspect that the scene existed beyond his critical capacity. A faggoty farm boy fussing over Nuyorican tail. The triumph of multiculturalism.
Word traveled around the party that I was the guy who threatened to kill Norman Mailer. High school is inescapable. No matter how many miles from home.
This gossip attracted a contingent of younger people. Some pretended to have read Trapped, but I knew that they hadn’t. People at literary parties never read each other’s books.
But one person had. He was about thirty years old, wearing this ratty blue cardigan and black-rimmed glasses.
—Hi, he said. I loved Trapped. You based it on Michael Alig, didn’t you?
—Are you a friend of Michael’s?
—Oh no, I’m too boring, he said. I caught him on the Joan Rivers Show. When I saw the name Michelle Gila, and the context, I presumed it had to be about the club kids.
—You’re the first person to catch the reference, I said.
—My name’s Cecil.
—Have you ever read Cecil Dreeme?
—You must be the only other person alive who knows the book, he said.
—I went to NYU, I said.
—A fellow alumnus, he said. I graduated in 1986.
I can’t remember if I screwed out Cecil’s brains that night. I might as well have. You meet some people and you’re doomed to come inside them and have them come inside you. Some dicks are as unavoidable as death. Some dicks are magnets to your metal.
If we didn’t avail ourselves of each other’s bodies on that first night, then it definitely happened on the next. And for days thereafter. Pretty soon we were going steady.
We were perfect together. Same interests, same tastes, same relative intelligence level, roughly the same level of attractiveness. Same industry. Cecil worked as an assistant editor at Vintage. He was the sweetest man that I’d dated, the most thoughtful, the only person who’d doted on me. He was always there in the morning with breakfast. The sex was great. We screwed each other’s brains out seven different ways from Sunday.
I sleptwalked through the days. Cecil by my side, talking, discussing concepts, being considerate, loving, asking with actions but not words if I loved him back, talking about moving in together, talking about our future, and me, eyes blank, head nodding, noncommittal answers, barely words, hugging him when necessary, kissing him when appropriate, screwing his brains out. I didn’t care. None of it mattered.
I remember obsessing over Jaime, when his presence changed the atmosphere, when the walls sparkled in his light. The same feeling with Erik. As if our entire relationship happened in Washington Square, him looking from the window of a crummy hotel, our breath making white clouds in the air. I could have died.
With Cecil it was only this thing. It happened.
Jaime and Erik were shitty people. In comparison, Cecil appeared like a divinity, like the god of boyfriends. Jaime hadn’t even been my boyfriend. He screwed my brains out and refused to tell his friends. Erik wouldn’t fess up to Mommie Dearest about our love. Cecil was on the phone every weekend, talking to his Ma and his sister in Chicago, telling them about me, putting me on the phone. His mother asked every weekend when I might visit. We developed a good phone relationship. She was very funny.
But I didn’t have the juice. I’d closed the book on that kind of love, on that kind of obsession, on that kind of infatuation. Maybe it was maturity. Maybe not.
—Baby, said Cecil, you’re the first guy who’s made me happy.
—I’m happy too, I said.
—Baby, said Cecil, you’re such an interesting person.
—You aren’t so bad yourself, I said.
—Baby, asked Cecil, what’s your favorite thing in New York?
—The Minettas, I said. What’s yours?
—Cleopatra’s Needle, said Cecil. Have you been?
I hadn’t. Cecil let out a girlish scream, the faggiest sound that he ever made, and insisted that we take the subway. Right that minute.
We got off the 6 train at 86th and walked to the Met. I presumed that we were going inside the museum, but Cecil dashed past the building and into the park, through the greenery and across a road into a circular enclosure, stopping before a giant granite obelisk.
Its four sides were weather blasted, stained black from pollution, as if the stone was corroded and rotting with atmospheric exposure. Destroyed by the filthy air that we daily breathed into our lungs.
—What is it? I asked.
—The oldest thing in New York. It’s from Heliopolis. It’s three thousand five hundred years old. It’s Egyptian, erected during the reign of Thutmose III.
The city’s toxicity had effaced two sides of hieroglyphics. The remaining two were barely visible. The obelisk was mounted on a base, bronzed crab claws emerging from beneath its bulk.
I was transfixed, thinking of the rock. Older than all of New York. Older than all of America. Fifteen hundred years old when Jesus was born. That isn’t old. That’s ancient. The clouds moving behind the obelisk.
I wobbled, stumbled, caught myself on the railing.
—Baby, are you okay?
—I’m fine, I said. I don’t know what happened. I was looking at the thing and it was like this sound went off in my head.
—Let’s get you home and into bed, said Cecil. I’ll make you something to eat.
Let me backtrack.
The Tunnel had reopened around Thanksgiving, a month after the police discovered the mummy but before the media linked the body with Dorian. Peter Gatien had purchased the club and shuttered it for renovations. The new décor looked a lot like Arena.
I skipped the reopening. I was busy. I did attend an event a few weeks later. For one night only, the club exhibited paintings by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I assumed that Michael Alig was responsible.
Michael had become a full-fledged drug addict, developing the mordant streak that is a common reference point among junkies. A real death trip, a modern-day Thanatos. He and the other club kids had started wearing bandages and makeup that simulated injuries. I was convinced the inspiration for this choice was a series of photos of Edie Sedgwick taken after she’d set fire to her room at the Chelsea Hotel. But no one would admit it.
Anyhoo, there I was in Tunnel, peering at the shitty paintings of a man who’d killed and raped something like thirty-five boys. I wondered what it meant.
America was always bloodstained, but serial killer chic was a new depth. A dying empire always meditates on death. Maybe Michael Alig’s junky intuition was like an extended antenna, an early warning system, a radar for the great coming doom.
On my way out, I was stopped by this slutty, druggy-looking guy. I’d seen him before, at Disco 2000, talking with Michael.
—You’re the writer, right?
—That’s what they tell me, I said.
He’d bleached his hair out an
d dyed it an unpleasant shade of copper. He’d smeared kohl around his eyes. He wore a Stüssy shirt and a pair of ugly jeans. He looked too old for his clothes. By the time a person reaches that age, they should either give up or be fabulous. No one can hover in the middle.
—I read your book, he said.
—Oh really? I asked.
—It blew my fucking mind. Michael said it was good. But Michael says lots of things are good. I bought a fucking copy and I think it’s just fucking amazing.
—Thanks, I said. It’s nice to hear.
—Is there somewhere we can talk?
—What’s your name? I asked.
—Franklin, he said.
—Franklin what? I asked.
—Franklin Perkins.
—Sure, Franklin Perkins, I said. We can go and talk. Let’s get the hell out of here. I can’t stand these crummy paintings.
James St. James worked the door. Honey, he said, why are you leaving so soon, aren’t those paintings fabulous? I said, No, they’re awful, I can’t stand them, and they’re beneath you, Jimmy. But James St. James just said, Honey, what isn’t?
We went to Franklin’s hovel in the East Village. We screwed each other’s brains out. It wasn’t great. It was better than okay. I spent the night. The only problem arose when Franklin broke out a wide array of dildos and harnesses.
—Sorry, I said, but I have a thing about sex toys.
—That’s okay, he said. Vanilla is still fucking hot.
When we woke up, he asked me if I wanted to get some breakfast. I said, Sure, yeah, let’s get some breakfast.
—I know this really great fucking place, he said. It’s called the Kiev.
—Oh, really? I asked. Let’s check it out.
Franklin had moved to Manhattan a few months earlier, emigrating from the middle of Connecticut. Don’t think that he was an innocent. He’d grown up in suburbia and screwed out the brains of every swish young man from Hartford and New Haven, giving of his body as indiscriminately as Jesus.
He’d seen Michael Alig on the Jane Whitney Show. The episode with G. G. Allin, right before Allin died of an overdose at 3rd & Avenue B.