Mirror, Mirror:
Same Difference
(FROM THE FILE ON THE ASTOR BAR)
“And what is truth?”
—Pontius Pilate
Wherein a landmark environ (school for scandal and lair of big male cats of many varying stripes) on Seventh Avenue at 44th Street (southwest corner, one half block north of the fabled Paramount Theater) off the lobby of the flagship Hotel Astor, quite belatedly immortalized by Cole Porter in “Well, Did You Evah?” from the motion picture High Society.
At the Astor, the “flit side” and the straight side reflected sideways at one another in the long mirror behind the oval onyx bar, a uniformity of setting suggestive of more than nothing imposed by the skyline of bottles ranged the mirrored length of the high altar.
From the straight side where women talk about their analysts and men about their women or their promotions, but attention has been known to stray:
“It’s real holiday for strings over there tonight, wouldn’t you say?”
“They don’t bother me—in fact, I hardly notice; but I was in the army with them.”
“Oh? In what outfit—the Fighting Powderpuffs?”
“I’ll ignore that. Actually, as a bunch, they were pretty gutsy.”
“It’s true, standards were relaxed during the war. Guys found themselves doing the old in-and-out with virtually anything that crawled.”
“Didn’t you know, baby? Life is a curve ball!”
The lady pouts: “Life isn’t about any of that, darling—life is about love!”
“The idea was, if he could make himself interesting to the right people, he wouldn’t have to work for a living—and so he does, and so he doesn’t.”
“A harlot high and low.”
“Yeah, high on Dexamil and low on talent.”
“No artist tolerates reality, Camus said—and we’re all potential artists, my friend—all turning what we say into the fantasy of what we are telling one another. ‘Going around telling people’ you hear people say. ‘Telling people what?’ you ask. ‘Things—does it matter what?’ It doesn’t. People are energized and fascinated by the possibility alone. Mark my words, one day in the very near future there will be a Nobel Prize for publicity.”
“Look, slice it any way you want, advertising isn’t meaningful work!”
“Emergent complexity, my ass—those are screen words for ‘Beats me.’”
“Allowing the earth is round, it is absolutely unnecessary to know where Archimedes places his lever.”
“That, if I ever heard one, is a truly subversive remark.”
“—devastating attacks with the doubling cube—absolutely uncanny for a woman.”
“If.”
“What do you mean, if?”
“Just what I said, babe, if. The middle word in Life. The word featured on all those graduation cards—on the scroll with the mortarboard on top. Kipling or somebody. They put out one for boys and another one for girls.”
“Leslie Fiedler says there were such homo-social couples as Nisus and Eurylaus, Castor and Pollux, Achilles and Patroclus—or much later, Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim. Couples who have in common not necessarily overt, covert or latent homosexuality, but who are entirely representative of the transgressive paradigm of male intimacy—a heterodox ortho-sexuality that seeks to challenge and subvert the soulless, misogynistic, competitive scrotal-control construction of masculinity in which the axiomatic moment of ontological trust is necessarily followed by aggression—dictated by mid-twentieth-century market capitalism.”
What’s he trying to do? Make the girl by appearing sensitive? Possibly.
“Very interesting—and what about Chopin in the mid-nineteenth century? Chopin and his pen-pal Tytus Woyciechowski, to whom he would send, by way of complimentary close, wet kisses on the mouth?”
“You’d have to know more about Polish customs before drawing any—”
“It’s American customs, not Polish ones, that worry me. Have you read Frederick Wertham, The Seduction of the Innocent? He absolutely proves that Batman and Robin are homosexual—that Batman comics are the wish dream of two homosexuals cohabiting—and Wonder Woman is the obvious lesbian counterpart.”
“—aiming at himself. It means we’re all homosexual.”
“Anybody says Hemingway is a fag, I’ll deck him!”
“The fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as homosexuality per se, and there never was. It is purely by a spurious metaphysical dialectics spawned out of the social energies of late capitalism that its necessity has been deduced and its operational plane situated. The queer, as queer is wholly and entirely the subject of a passive verb, he who by desiring himself imagines himself desired—and that is very sad.”
Zoom in on the guy who calls everybody “sweetheart” and “darling”:
“Let me let you in on a little something political, darling. Politicizing queers is as stupid and dangerous as politicizing Jews—and you can see where that is leading us! Jews and queers are Culture warriors—or so they’d have us believe—and if Culture is the new religion—which it clearly is—then it makes no more sense to make political animals out of queers and Jews than it ever did to make soldiers out of priests. And don’t tell me about the Jesuits, sweetheart, I know all about the Jesuits—or about that fat little fag Spellman, putting on fatigues and humping it to Korea, which was sickening.”
“‘The archer is aiming for himself.’ Does anybody realize the implications?”
“Actually, I don’t know about culture, sweetheart, I leave all that to the French-cuff boys with hairdos, but I’ll tell you another thing for sure—fags have got a hammerlock on Broadway. All the successful Broadway playwrights are fags—Tennessee Williams, Bill Inge, Gore Vidal. . . .”
“The osculum nefandum—the serpent taught Eve how to rim.”
“And Shanghai Lil taught the Duchess of Windsor.”
“. . . axiomatically, not on evidence. I absolutely can’t buy it—not even at the discount they’re giving.”
“Women have multiple orgasms, men have continuous thought; it’s a deal.”
“Really? Is that a truth universally acknowledged? I don’t know how you can honestly call ricochet continuous thought, and the only deal I know is, first they hand you a bat and tell you to keep it in your pants. Then when you can’t stand that any more, they put you up and start you swinging. First you get to first base, then you get to second base; then you get to third base, and then you make the run for home plate—and it turns out home plate is a trap door. That’s the only deal I know about, sweetheart!”
(Therefore since all sex is aggressive, all aggression sexual, there is really no such thing as heterosexuality or homosexuality: there are merely circumstantial object combats; which tilts the scientific categorization habit of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.)
“Every explanation which does not ultimately lead to a relation of which no ‘why’ can be further demanded—homosexuality being a prime example—stops at an accepted qualitas occulta. And Freud, who certainly had what you would call a sufficiently dim view of the whole of humanity, seems to have held for homosexuals a peculiar sympathy.”
“The overwhelmingly expressive effect of skewed features; the secret calculus of the human heart; the deepest—”
“Oh, give it up!”
“Well, that little encounter sure blew his proximity fuse—no shit.”
“Please don’t talk to me about Ernest Fucking Hemingway. I’ve got my own novel to write. I’ve got the title and everything. And the Sun Goes Down in the West—And That’s It. Why don’t-cha come up sometime—see me; I’ll tell ya the plot.”
They look over at the flit side.
“You can’t really tell who’s over there in this light—only that they’re over there . . . whoever they are.”
“Perspeculum in aenigmate. Shadows.”
“Going around telling people.”
“They’re over there, like missionaries, recruiting—they do it at all hours of the day and night. Their antennae vibrate at large, in all directions at once—identifying objectives, projecting goals—”
“Tangling tonsils.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised; in this light you can’t really tell. I do know, however, they like to tongue one another’s ears.”
“—forging plans to reach them, organizing, monitoring; judging consequences to see it’s all accomplished as intended. They’re as active at it, as driven, as that Army recruiting office across the street. Since they can’t breed, they recruit—they call it ‘bringing a prospect out.’ And even if it isn’t biological, they still relate it to some kind of damned evolutionary process—seed, breed and generation—like when the first hominid crossed over and became—”
“Homo sapiens!”
“Exactly! They even forge genealogies related to who-brought-who-out, so it ends up sounding like racing—you know, like Seabiscuit from Man o’War through Hard Tack.”
“‘I got the horse right here, and man this horse is queer,’ huh? The sport of queens.”
“Exactly. Guys and Dolls, only with guy dolls.”
“It’s ‘the horse right here, his name is Paul Revere.’”
“So it is, darling, but the whole world knows that Paul Revere was queer.”
“Homosexuals, having no progeny and therefore no future, and affectively compromised by things themselves, are pathologically overinvested in the memories of things.”
“A queer is a set of attributes that constitutes an absence—some grim state I call it.”
“Be thankful for a tankful—that’s what I say.”
“Interesting—because the phrase that comes to mind when I think of queers is what-not.”
“Queers think three is an even number, which divided by two gives one-and-then-some.”
“Anyway, this place is one of their prime hangouts, famous on their grapevine. They trawl Eighth Avenue—between the Dixie Bus Station and the 50th Street one—for young colts arriving. Then they bring the stuff here, to their paddock—their saddling enclosure—and break it in.
“He felt the horse’s barrel, expanded between his knees. The horse lifted its head, neighed and reared on its hind legs. Et cetera.”
“And the interesting thing is, though some of the prospects are geldings, not all of them are. It’s higher-order purposeful behavior, all right.”
“Higher order and purposeful indeed. Not to my mind, they aren’t. To my mind they are merely busy. Infantile—in fact, hebephrenic; visions of sugarplums dance in their heads.”
“What is hebephrenic? It sounds like some kind of Jewish psychosis.”
“Oh, really!”
“I am sure that is not meant as an anti-Semitic remark—merely one that indicates how aware you are—as we all should be, really—of the, shall we say, convergence of interest prevalent between Jews and homosexuals. For instance, the phenomenon of the great pianist. It has been rightly said that to be one or the other seems almost a prerequisite, and to be both makes it an almost moral duty.”
“If it’s true that in order to achieve consciousness we must become the objects of our own perceptual systems, then who can ever be more conscious than the homosexual?”
“What I want to know is, do they feel the things we do? Do they feel anxious, happy, sad the way we do? They put on pain-racked faces, but do they suffer? Because I really can’t tell. And I can’t tell because I’m accustomed to read the facial expressions and bodily movements that indicate states of mind according to a pattern related specifically to two sexes, and their facial expressions and bodily movements are so mixed together—some like boys’, more like girls’—that what it comes down to is, I can’t tell are those expressions simply mismatched copies of the ones we make, without the underlying feeling?”
“Lamont Cranston—The Shadow; ask him—he knows.”
“My analyst says that what they have, more than feelings, is feelings about their feelings—and that operation in them is continuous—like I was saying about orgasms in women. They can’t help it, and it makes them completely crazy in less than half a normal lifetime.”
“Really. Like that other thing they used to say stunts your growth and makes you crazy?”
“More or less, yes. Also too few of them are happily socialized to the peculiar rules of their interpretive community—consisting almost entirely of learned and rapid-fire commentary.”
“Well, my analyst calls them ‘from the psychic womb untimely ripped.’”
“Hey, that’s not bad—not bad at all.”
“The fact is, they are paranoid schizophrenics in regression, pure and simple and nothing else. Not hebephrenic at all—which although once employed was a rather fanciful and romantic diagnosis and has virtually disappeared from the diagnostic manual. Their gesticulations are in fact frantic, beseeching signals of a longing for their opposite, stasis, which, because they understand only too well that process will be the death of them, they see as their only hope.”
“You don’t mince words.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion, when all’s said and done, that psychoanalysis is, by and large, really only a subcategory of Jugendstil.”
“I always think people are interesting when seen through another’s eyes.”
“Really? Dawn Powell points out, in Turn, Magic Wheel, anybody seen literally in another’s eyes is extremely diminutive and upside down.”
“Lamont Cranston—a fag?”
“Absolutely.”
“Listen. why don’t we just admit it; we’re jealous of them. They have their cake and eat it too; we hate that.”
“Did you say cake?”
“Hey—wordplay! You boys in advertising are so clever.”
“Listen, I don’t care what you say—I find them disgusting.”
“Really? You know, Darwin called disgust a specific feeling excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odor or nature of our food.”
“Whatever that’s supposed to mean, I don’t think—”
“You’re interested in eating them. I don’t either—not exactly. In any case, among subjects tested, disgust always seems to have to do with food, body products and sex—particularly when the normal exterior envelope of the body is felt to have been somehow breached or altered.”
“So?”
“So, all I really mean I guess is that, in the anthropological sense—and especially since the establishment of diffusionist criticism and the fieldwork tradition—the inescapable moral relationship between the observer and the observed precludes anything but a highly colored and ambiguous relevance to any observation.”
“‘Once more into the breach.’ Didn’t Shakespeare say—”
“Egregious fag—bent as Hook’s crook. Those sonnets, man! Once more into his britches is more like it, you ask me.”
“Food left untouched, for instance, on the plates of strangers, won’t—”
“My point exactly—those specimens over yonder will pick a strange plate clean, so to speak.”
“What do you mean by fieldwork? I never go near—”
“I’m sure you don’t, but for those who sometimes do, and can talk about the experience calmly and without undue prejudice, it is quite clear that behind the whimsy and the irony, the clutter of analogies and the multiple asides—which certainly does put one in mind of Durkheim’s notion of social effervescence—there is not only a very clear example of le fait social total, but also some powerful and exciting mentation. Particularly as they are wont to communicate in special signs—a sign being defined in anthropology these days as a transmission or construct by which one organism affects the behavior or state of another in a communication situation on any of three levels, the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic.”
“Now look here, bottom button—”
“Such as the transmission of the clap—result of a pragmatic communication situation in the raw, as an anthropologist might put it.
“In my day close men friends were called adhesive.”
“It would seem God made queers for the hell of it.”
From the flit side:
“He developed this routine. He’d stand by a taxi stand looking, you know, all wan and lost. Inevitably some mark would come along, take a cab, and before closing the door, ask ‘Can I drop you?’ ‘I don’t know why not—everybody else has.’ Worked every time.”
“Over there, up against the bar. One of those bewildered Philadelphia Main Line boys commutes from the other side after he’s had a few, tells you right out he’s from the City of Brotherly Love, and how Whitman lived right across the river in Camden. You know the type—spent his entire adolescence drifting past Eakins’s ‘Swimming Hole’ in the Museum down there.”
“We used to call ‘The Swimming Hole’ the queer ‘September Morn.’”
“‘There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.’ Chesterton, dear.”
“Yes, dear, a dream right out of Faust—the real Faust, not the ghastly opera. The doorman hands me a little gold key—I was, am still, Phi Beta Kappa. ‘That little thing,’ I object. ‘Hold it in your hand.’ . . . ‘Faust,’ you understand, means ‘fist’ in Old German.”
“Oooh!”
“Yes. ‘Hold it in your hand and watch it grow. It has an instinct for the right place—follow it down the stairs to the place of the Fathers.’”
“The fathers, and the uncles, and the brothers, and the nephews.”
“Then I woke up. It’s such a comfort to be educated.”
“For once there was something found that Agrippina would rather have been than what she was: that something was a soldier boy.”
“Marc was down there anyway, under the sheltering palms, sending back ecstatic postcards to all and sundry about the Caribbean moon, the intoxicating flora, the sha-sha-sha of the casuarinas, when in a single evening he succumbed to a fatal mishap of an unspecified nature.”
“A gay knock, dear.”
“Succinctly put—and borne out by the nature of the injuries.”
“The only faggot composers worth talking about are Sam Barber and Henry Cowell.”
“Not Lenny?”
“Lenny’s a fake, but he isn’t a fraud; there’s a difference.”
“I would throw myself at his feet.”
“Really? A woman who meant business would aim a little higher.”
“. . . the accurate slicing of fragile structures.”
“Exactly.”
“Queers in the Bible, dear? Ubiquitous—starting with Adam’s off ox. Jacob, for instance—queer as Dick’s hatband.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Let’s face it, dahling, more passionate kisses have been given to GIs by French generals.”
“Or to T.S. Eliot by Jean Verdenal—mort aux Dardenelles.”
“Well, as to that, dahling, we’ve all had our Phoenician Phlebases, dead or dying in our arms.”
“Have we?”
“‘I fucked his brains out. . . . I fucked his brains out.’ He kept on insisting like that. ‘Really,’ I finally said back, ‘hardly the work of an evening, was it? How did you pass the rest of the time you’d purchased—reading to him aloud from Huckleberry Finn?’”
“If Camp is my language, it is so only in a complex, contested and painful way.”
“Oh, darling, we’ve noticed that—you are so brave!”
“The line from Mildred Pierce I’ve never forgotten is Jack Carson’s. ‘You know me, Mildred, I see an opportunity, right away I start in cutting myself a piece of throat; it’s an instinct.’”
“It woke you up to the world, huh?”
“It did just that.”
“See him? One of a pair of divinely beautiful identical twins who never go anywhere except, it’s said, home to bed, together. In society’s night sky they alternate, dear, like Castor and Pollux—and, get this, the one over there is regularly seen shadow-boxing at the West Side Y—not exactly sparring with his social equals—while the other is to be found daily—mounted—on the horsepath in Central Park. Très gay!”
“An investor, don’t-cha know. A big brute on the Street. She regularly wakes up screaming from such nightmares as being drowned in the Great South Sea Bubble Bath!”
Pan in on the straight side:
“It’s a cute setup. When the curtain goes up, one is sitting at the piano playing Chopin and the other is sitting on the couch reading Schopenhauer. Get it?”
“They’re so clever up in Cambridge, aren’t they.”
“Too much is banned in Boston. I prefer New York and its immediate vicinity. Everything from Ibsen to burlesque, and back on the ferry for the late show at Upstairs at the Downstairs.”
“Chopin and Schopenhauer—I don’t know if I do get it.”
“I would’ve preferred New York in the Gay Nineties—Stanford White and all that. Do you know they even had boy burlesque!”
“You think they’ll ever have boy burlesque again?”
“In another hundred years, perhaps.”
“‘Zip—I was reading Schopenhauer last night,
Zip—and I think that Schopenhauer was right.’”
Back to the straights:
“Schopenhauer believed that in the rapt contemplation of the sculptured essence of man, men escape the restless striving of their own souls, the innumerable temporal vanities of individual men. His delineation of the characteristic dilemma of the romantic will, which can never get what it wants and never love what it gets, is unsurpassed in the history of thought. His pages on the insight of genius and the quality of esthetic perception, his luminous—”
“The sculptured essence of man—meaning statues?”
“Statues, or those muscle magazines you see. Physique Pictorial and all.”
“Ah.”
“His luminous writing on music, his dramatic rendering of the pity and negation which constitute the lives of saints—is too much.”
“For television?”
“Schopenhauer said women had long hair and short ideas—that doesn’t sound very faggy to me. Fags play up to women on purpose—it’s how they score against us.”
“Some fags—well, maybe most fags—play up to women, but a lot of them play up to us, thinking we won’t know they’re fags. Anyway, Schopenhauer had the bitch mother of all time—she hated his guts—threw him down a flight of stairs, in fact—so you can’t go by that; he’s still a fag. His philosophy—and Nietzsche’s too, is fundamentally the philosophy of the tête-à-tête in the mirror—and nobody has mirror tête-à-têtes like fags.”
“Categorical statements are, I always think, similar to the point of congruity. They are all more or less like the statement that all games played with bats and balls—or sticks and stones—are unequivocally phallic. Difficult to impossible to refute—being the product of dogmatic minds alarmed at the operations of a thinking which obeys only the imperatives of its own internal norm, they are all by and large confessions of cognitive failure.”
“Well, that explains it. George Sand—who by the way was a hermaphrodite—used to throw Chopin down the stairs all the time—on Majorca, you know. You can read all about it in his letters to the Polish boyfriend. Laura Riding Jackson did the same to Robert Graves.”
“A fag, without question—he admitted it.”
“Excuse me, George Sand was not a hermaphrodite; George Eliot was a hermaphrodite. The second husband jumped out the window in Venice, into the Grand Canal, on the honeymoon.”
“Laura Riding Jackson is John Ashbery’s favorite poet, speaking of Cambridge. He’s gone to live in Paris—possibly forever, or that’s the noise.”
“I’ll bet Frank O’Hara hopes so anyway.”
“Anyway, all this hip versus square crap is bullshit. Hip, square—two sides of the same coin . . . kind of a symbiosis. The only interesting life is the double life. Lie to everybody—Jekyll-Hyde. One face for the daylight, another for the night.”
“Straight white males are vestigial? What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like endangered—like striped dolphins in the Mediterranean.”
“Let’s face it, Freud was a fag—I mean he admitted it too for chrissakes—admitted he was in love with that other fag who was into noses.”
“Interesting—if not quite immitigably convincing.”
“‘Teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger.’ That’s all I remember of Schopenhauer. Pretty depressing, really.”
“I remember a little more—two consecutive sentences actually, from The World as Will and Idea. ‘The occasion of an erection is a motive, because it is an idea, yet it operates with the necessity of a stimulus: it cannot be resisted. This is also the case with disgusting things, which excite the desire to vomit.’”
“I rest my case.”
“Y’know everybody says that in here—the place is a regular Case Dormitory.”
“So far as Schopenhauer goes, Freud put paid to his vogue. There are no ideas and there is no will; there are introjects and there are cathexes—that’s it.”
“I disagree absolutely. Freud is Schopenhauer redux, in fancier German. Schopenhauer’s thing on subduing assimilations, on no victory without conflict—lower Vorstellungen brought into subjection by higher. Freud took it all, rendering it, I grant you, in better German, but so what, when it has been translated into a grotesque English with words like ‘cathexis’ and ‘introject’ and ‘abreaction.’”
“I don’t know about translations, but he’s right about the will, so far as fags are concerned. Does anybody realize how many of them die intestate? It’s pretty amazing.”
Someone has observed that Kinsey has set up a volunteer booth on the mezzanine floor of the hotel where you can go and volunteer information.
“Everybody lies!”
“‘What is truth?’ asked Pilate—getting his nails done in that beauty parlor on the mezzanine.”
“Yeah, well, they’ve been leaking information to the press, and get this. Turns out queers have statistically bigger cocks than straight guys.”
“Only statistically?”
“It’s not funny. You know how guys are about their—”
“Dimensions, yes.”
“And sometimes they exaggerate.”
“You don’t say. So, they—oh, I get it. If they do, then they—”
“Exactly.”
“There’s simply no getting around it—it’s encoded in the language: in both oral and anal sex, the passive role is degrading. Look at Egyptian hieroglyphs of captured soldiers taking it up the ass, and tell me otherwise.”
“An interesting particular, if not an immitigably convincing one. In point of fact, the language we speak and read is rather closer to Greek than to Egyptian hieroglyphs—and on Greek vases it looks like something rather more complex than degrading. All roosters proffered as love gifts by the erastes, the whole tradition of pederastic paidaia—”
“As Thomas Mann, for example, was at pains—”
“Well, Thomas Mann was a fag; fucked his own son—that was the word.”
“Like that guy in the Paul Bowles story.”
“‘Pages from Cold Point’—wild story.”
“Fags are committed to a deep-seated disequilibirum, and that’s that. For instance, take the case of Flaubert.”
“Flaubert was a fag?”
“No, Flaubert was not a fag. I’m talking about the appreciation of his work. We all know what his masterpiece is, right? Madame Bovary, but go and listen to the fags and you’ll be told it’s really Salammbô.”
“Interesting, because down at NYU—”
“You mean N.Y.Jew, don’t you?”
“Oh, come on, didn’t you ever see Gentleman’s Agreement?”
“You’ll have to cross to the other side for those arrangements.”
“Jews and homosexuals, not exactly a novel insight.”
“I never read novels—except maybe by the likes of Flaubert.”
“But some of your best friends do.”
“Yes, and at NYU they have this new thing, intertextuality, whereby they read two books together, like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, or Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. . . .”
“. . . or Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire.”
“And they are now reading Madame Bovary and Salammbô like that.”
“Madame Salammbovary. Cute.”
“Teeth, throat and bowels—depressing; cripplingly so.”
“The homosexual’s highly stereotyped attack strategy is narrow, fixed in its repertoire and seemingly unaware of any object in the larger environment—weaving webs, ambushing anything resembling a prey, no matter where it is, showing no signs of adaptation to the larger scenarios of a wider world. Domain-general regulatory capacities seem entirely beyond their understanding—which leaves them immersed in streams of raw episodic experience from which they can gain no significant distance.”
“On the other hand, single-mindedness is what won the West.”
“The West, the war, the contract for Pepsodent. . . .”
“The paradigm, you understand, specifies detailed declarative knowledge of the world.”
“So it says here in small print.”
“Look, the cognitive system of the homosexual on the prowl, his verbal stun gun, loaded and cocked, is fixed to respond automatically, with practically no possibility of withheld response.”
“Busy little bees, full of stings—”
“Making honey—but honeybees, you know, despite their utilization of nervous systems of great complexity and the execution of dances of amazing precision, do not, by any criterion I am aware of—pace Maeterlinck—possess consciousness. One cannot extrapolate—in honeybees or in social-climbing homosexuals—directly from neural complexity—or neurotic activity—to awareness. Awareness arises from some very specific design features of particular kinds of nervous systems.”
“Hard-as-nails ones?”
“That’s one variety, surely. In any case, the controlling insect mind is distributed—like the homosexual’s—across many rudimentary minds; it constitutes a social-cognitive system which makes no exigent demands on any individual brain, and which few would suggest as an appropriate model for human culture.”
“Chanel called Cocteau an insect—an unspeakably vile pederast who never did anything his whole life long except steal things from people.”
“I can’t really accept that honeybee-dance analogy. Have you ever seen bees lined up to do the Madison, or executing knife-edge box-turns in the Peabody the way they do out in Cherry Grove? We taxi over from Kismet just to watch them—they’re fantastic!”
“. . . and of course they have their own fraternities—campus to campus.”
“Do they get pinned?”
“Pinned? They get nailed—and not only by the cops either. Among themselves, I’m told, they go in for re-enacting the Crucifixion.”
“Of the Nazarene—yes, I’ve heard those stories.”
“You want to carefully sift through the ER admissions records at Mass General some time.”
“I don’t know that I do, really.”
“Anyway, I spell the Crucifixion C-R-U-C-I-F-I-C-T-I-O-N.”
“A girl always won the eighth-grade spelling bee.”
“Queers are, despite their evident solipsism, flocking creatures, with next to no ability to cultivate and build on individual relationships. They respond, each of them, to his own proprioceptive somatic enclosure with the rapt self-absorption of cats washing themselves, but ask them to give a kid a bath—well, you wouldn’t do that anyway, but you do follow the drift, I hope.”
“Obviously there’s a homosexual element in Godot, and in Endgame too—no question. That doesn’t mean—”
“The whole Islamic world is bisexual. They have a proverb, ‘For children, a woman; for pleasure, a boy; for delight, a melon.’”
“A melon?”
“That reminds me of the time back in college when I was in the fraternity and we used to pass around these—you know, pictures—and in one of them that was supposed to be funny the guy was doing exactly that: fucking a canteloupe with a hole bored in it. He was either a very weird guy—which I suppose you would have to be in the first place to pose for such things—or else trained by Stella Adler, a very good Method actor, you know, because his eyeballs were rolling up into his skull and he was obviously either coming or, as I say—”
“I was in a fraternity too—and the same pictures were passed around, only we had one guy who was Italian, raised on Long Island, and he confessed to fucking cantaloupes regularly out of his father’s garden as a teenager. Also something he called a ga-gooz, which he said was almost as good as the cantaloupe if you put in a little olive oil first.”
“Excuse me boys, I hate to spoil the fun, but what the proverb means is the sublime delight in eating a melon.”
“Oh . . . well. . . .”
“Please don’t—I just had a delicious dinner.”
“. . . of a like mind—a beguiling phrase, really.”
“Sweetheart, will you let a Madison Avenue mandarin let you in on something deep, dark and disgusting? When Norman Mailer rails against toothpaste being marketed, not so much to clean the teeth as to fend off the irresistible urge to fellatio—”
“Is he really doing that?”
“I thought he was talking about that shit Pepsodent used to say was in their—irium? Raymond Chandler once called it just another name for the ineffable.”
“Irium is what the professor put in Bugs Bunny’s carrot to make him Super Rabbit.”
“The thing I always wondered about Bugs Bunny was why he didn’t have a girlfriend. I mean, aren’t rabbits supposed to fuck—I mean isn’t it proverbial?”
“The early Bugs had a girlfriend, but they got rid of her.”
“Bugs is a fag. That’s why he says ‘What’s up, Doc?’”
“Oh, really!”
“Anyway, he isn’t talking about the housewife, he’s talking about himself.”
“Bugs? Always. That’s another way we know that he’s a fag.”
“Norman Mailer says Ulysses is not obscene because its express intent is not pornographic. What’s express intent?”
“Express intent, sweetheart? Express intent speeds by on the middle track and gets you there a lot faster than local intent.”
“Hah-hah!”
“Norman Mailer’s not queer, is he?”
“Nor do you want him to be.”
“Norman Mailer, no. Rock Hudson, supposedly. Bugs Bunny, maybe. I could go for Bugs, if I could get around the teeth, and probably, in circumstances, for Rock. The way he cried in A Farewell To Arms. You never see a guy cry on the screen like that; it was kind of beautiful. ’Scuse, me Honeybunch, I’m usually more careful around women, but being even a little bi-lateral is a strain in this culture, where the nance element holds sway in matters Platonic.”
“Holds sway, indeed. Swing and sway with—Rock Hudson, eh? Would you throw on the duck sauce? You don’t have to answer that: we don’t want to make you cross to the flit side, not without your flit gun, anyway, in case the fruit flies are in evidence.”
“Platonic. That’s ancient Greek isn’t it? Everybody in Ancient Greek was queer, right?”
“Not exactly; in ancient Greece they were what you’d call Homer-sexual.”
“A comedian. Everybody’s suddenly a comedian.”
“It’s television. Anyway, fuck Norman Mailer. When he isn’t bawling about reverence and poise and the quality of the felt life, or about the free play of the vital intelligence.”
“Hah! C’est à rire. The cheap feel and the free ride are more his style—him and his GI bill of goods. Nietzsche is the only one who knew anything about the felt life—although they say Kinsey is still trying to find out about it, upstairs in the mezzanine.”
“Who?”
“Kinsey—Doctor Kinsey. Still at it you know, on the mezzanine.”
“On the mezzanine—what is he, your dentist?”
“Kinsey drew a line with seven points—the degrees of inversion.”
“Seven is a big queer lucky number—seven and eleven. They all claim to have at least seven inches and dream of going down on at least eleven.”
“Inches.”
“Suspects—per day; each with eleven inches.”
“Arithmetic evidence overwhelms me.”
“Seven inches, eleven suspects, The Sixth Man—it’s all just roulette.”
“And the lady gambles.”
“Too-shay.”
“You know, James Dean cried in East of Eden—and in Rebel Without a Cause, too. Plus which, he lived over at the Iroquois before he went to Hollywood.”
“Listen, Valentino, Monty Clift, James Dean, Rock Hudson—all those heartthrob boys.”
“Lived over at the Iroquois before they went out to Hollywood.”
“Very funny.”
“Mental autonomy vis-à-vis the environment is the principal criterion for judging an advanced mentality.”
“The Museum of Human Oddities. I asked directions for that place once; they sent me here.”
“Probably figured you wouldn’t make it to the Blue Parrot.”
“So you want to be famous—anything else?”
“Well, relationships . . . people; in the object field?”
“I wouldn’t worry, if I were you, about your object field. You can always put those award-winning projections where your object field ought to be.”
“I haven’t won any awards—not as yet.”
“Oh, but you will, buddy, you will! You cannot conceivably miss. The more your being just happens to happen, the more the mystery of its self-disclosure self-discloses. And nobody need ever know you flunked the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or that you appear so deceptively open precisely because you are so fundamentally defended. You will be a star, darling, and I for one promise to stare at you as you go by.”
“I’m not from Minnesota, I’m from Wisconsin.”
“Of course you are, darling, and so are the Lunts.”
“I don’t understand a word you’ve been saying.”
“Teeth, throat and bowels—kind of thing can ruin your life.”
“Let me tell you the true name of this city, baby; this city is called Men-da-city.”