Met Michael Maslansky for lunch (Canter’s on Fairfax).
Inter alia (all about MP and the Mawrdew Czgowchwz tease; MM said to take every Hollywood tease dead seriously) a reprise of the endless cocaine marathon discussion at Tom and Judy Lillard’s about why my mother was a Bette woman and his mother a Joan woman.
“Deep Joan,” I said.
“Don’t make fun of Joan, baby—it’s not smart to make fun of Joan; Joan was deep.”
It was of course in Curtis Bernhardt’s Possessed (Joan opposite Van Heflin, in which she is, instead of “as complex as a Bach fugue,” as murky as a Brahms sextet) that the medics inject the serum and she counts backwards. Opinion is sharply divided on whether or not she was dubbed.
It was clear to Author that, more than any other actress in her salary bracket in heyday Hollywood, Joan was successively raped by the male gaze. In return for the privilege of behaving in a way she came to believe appropriate to a Hollywood star, and in an exchange with which a few hundred thousand of her somewhat identity-challenged female and homosexual male audience identified absolutely, she became the utterly passive accomplice in what indeed was a movement in motion pictures as hieratic as Byzantine art . . . et cetera.
MM: Did I tell you she was deep, baby? She was.
In the Celebrity cab, along Sunset Boulevard, feeling dropped into another story, or set of stories, Author felt like Davis on loan-out from Warners (all that black and white and shadows and rain) to Metro (the Baghdad of Hollywood studios), so that all of his thought and gesture came though in Technicolor, with swooping musical soundtracks. Also, looking out the window, he found himself beset with telephone-pole nostalgia.
Back in that preceding decade, Bill Hoffman (dramatist, author of the best of the AIDS plays, As Is) had reported, back in New York, how, having gone out to Los Angeles for the filming, he got into the routine of taking Santa Monica Boulevard boys home and paying them just to talk. Authentic dialogue rhythmically rendered, never rhetorically charged or haranguing, except as a utility in climaxes, had long been the hallmark of his work, and he would take down the fantasies they retailed.
These, he and QT agreed, comparing notes, were hardly ever as developed, as shaped, as those redacted by Boyd McDonald for Straight to Hell, but more so than the manifestations on view a few years later in the calculated stroke videos of the entrepreneurial master-baiter Dirk Yates, these always erotically charged by the sound of jets landing just out the window. (Who has not dreamed of doing it in the, yes, cockpit, with both the uniformed pilot and his co, while a flying machine the size of a crosstown New York City block is on automatic pilot, being flown by a computer in Atlanta.) Low-budget videos in which room tone has seldom been adjusted for clarity, meant, of course, to suggest verisimilitude, a quality otherwise in short supply, as the pseudo-candid-camera talent is composed in the main of white-trash specimens dressed up as young and not-so-young Marines from San Diego’s already notorious Camp Pendleton, in and out of uniform, spread out on the couch and/or the bed, drinking beer and masturbating to not very convincing, abundant or particularly fulfilling orgasms—off-the-rack amateurs tending not to have many such same.
Enter Chad, the Melrose Avenue boy of a thousand-and-one faces, all of them identically posed out of a thousand-and-one high school yearbooks, enveloped in the full-spectrum rainbow mists of his illusions, sitting with two rather drab and formless handlers, telling his tales. But are these illusions? Can they be? Could they be sustained by this mannequin? Are they not meticulously honed, relentlessly drilled performances, calculated precisely to create illusion? It must be so; it could not be otherwise; the alternative is too sensational not only to be studied but even to read in the train.
“Meet Chad. He’s something of a legend with us, even among all the pathological liars in Boys Town, all the Marnies who claim to have been Marines.
“You could say he dresses up to people, only of course he’s always naked. Different strokes for different folks, as they say in Senior Loveland, but after all, how many ways are there to jack off, really?
“No, it’s goes deeper—which of course is what he likes best; he’ll be doing it for free in his old-whore age, when he’s thirty-five. But he’s somehow different from one to the next.
“But since you have a number of other calls to make in the neighborhood, doubtless including high tea on Ivar, you won’t have time to sit through the feature, but you must at least check out the preview of coming attractions. Do say you will.”
With pleasure, Author avowed.
“Oh, goody! You’ll find the boy rather like certain operatic heroines, throwing up many riddles, having a pronounced power instinct that is nevertheless terribly brittle. It’s a gay turn—and he definitely does aspire to leading roles, in restaurants and at star parties—hilltop and beach house.”
“Probably the right idea, since restaurants are being called the new theater.”
“And drugs the new cinema. Hilarious. [to Chad] All right, Superboy, you’re on. This is your chance to wow them in the print culture. [to QT] Chad’s big on the print culture, as they never taught him to write.”
“I like your silk pajamas.”
“The television executive gave me all these silk shorts and pajamas just to walk around in.”
“Samples.”
“In the beginning he walked around in silk shorts and pajamas and I walked around bareassed, while he teased me about being a wild Indian—‘a wild untamed spirit in an exquisitely civilized body’ were his exact words. I wrote them down—I have them somewhere, if you’d like to—”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. Civilized.”
“Well, I work out.”
“Of course. Being spoken to like that makes for easy listening.”
“It does. He was incredibly nice. Awesome. Really. I once asked him why—how—he was so nice. He laughed and told me I knew too many people in the movies; I should get to know more people in television. He said television and lingerie had something in common: the lingerie business was to the clothing business what television was to the movies. That’s how he talked.”
(Not bad. He doesn’t seem to like silences.)
“He was considerate and gave me massages.”
(Lovely eyes.)
Handler Two enters discussion: “Define yourself in jockeys, we insisted; we see him as a Ganymede—who got a very high place at table on Mount Olympus.”
Chad: “That’s right above Laurel Canyon; they live up there, these guys.”
Handler One: “Jared Benson type, but maybe with any luck bound for higher ground than El Paso. A little spoiled for choice, true—what can you expect when they not only get hosed down and buffed up, but are given both expensive teeth and an expensive vocabulary?”
Chad: “My television executive saw it differently. ‘Don’t ever wear Calvin Klein underwear—or any other kind of jockey short. You’re better than that. You’re a forthright young man, not a little faggot mannequin in a diaper.’ He saw me in boxer shorts.”
Handler Two: “He wanted to own you, baby; we want to share you with the world.”
“Underwear was his fetish. ‘The Greeks understood drapery; a man’s stuff nesting along his thick thigh under light white cotton.’ I didn’t even know who Ganymede was then.”
(And look at you now, eh?)
“When he told me, I asked him what happened when Ganymede grew up, got hair on his balls, stopped being grateful for crumbs from an old man’s fancy table?”
(He had a point, I reflected; not a ridiculous one either.)
“‘The Greek myths do not record history,’ he said, ‘they record immutable truth. He who humbles himself—not he who allows other to humiliate him—shall be exalted. He who allows others to humiliate him will go on doing so. And never put mascara on your eyes; you’re not a girl, you’re a beautiful young man. A little green eye shadow, with your coloring, and a hint of blush to prevent that detached quality—which is wildly attractive—from hardening into disdain. And go light on the cologne. Heavy cologne suggests a career overcoming the stench of cat spunk and wino shit in the back alleys off Santa Monica. You do not need to play it for sympathy; johns are born sympathetic . . . unless, of course, they’re not.’”
Handler One: “Roman generals used to wear rouge in their triumphal parades, so as to appear to be blushing with embarrassment at all the attention they were getting from the mob.”
Author then charged them to let the boy just talk. Already he had begun to resemble, mutatis mutandis, Vilja de Tanguay—who happily, at last report, had apparently changed her mind, deciding to live, and whose headliner career in the increasingly up-market drag venues of both the East and West Ends had become for Author a source of quiet satisfaction, even if her entrance line, to orchestral fanfare, not suggestive of serenity, was, “Make a path there, will you please—stretcher party!”
Chad, nostalgic, on his New York Period: “Yes, the Haymarket on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street, quick turns at the Adonis on 51st Street, at the Big Top on Broadway and 47th and the 55th Street Playhouse, aisle dancing at the Gaiety Male Burlesque, over the Howard Johnson’s: they could hear the music downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Fat America, and their two-point-nine fat kids, together outweighing six New York street urchins, pigging out on the fried clams and the pie à la mode.”
Author, nostalgic in turn, recalls his now fully grown University of Washington graduate nephews as teenagers on a Christmas visit to their grandparents in New York. Their bold request:
“Will you take us to see the ladies of the night?”
“Absolutely. I’ll even wait for you on the curb until you finish.”
“Are you crazy? Only to look at, okay?”
“Absolutely—and would you be interested then in seeing the gentlemen of the night?”
“What, pimps?”
“No, no, dear, for that you’re better off watching Naked City. I mean the gentlemen hookers—you know, as in Midnight Cowboy.”
“Oh, . . . well, . . . yeah, sure.”
So he took them to the Haymarket, where they actually shot pool, cool as two cucumbers with the hustlers. And as they were both both manly and beautiful—big hunks of boy from the Pacific Northwest, one Celtic-Nordic blond, the other a darker, brooding type—while he, QT, sat at the bar thinking (of all things) of the Stonewall, and determining to stay sober drinking in case anything untoward . . . because the look on the barman’s face, not to mention the collective gaze of the drooling warthog brigade when he trotted in with the pair, was something else, and he, QT, was actually the godfather of the younger, the blond.
They remembered it. Later that night, back in Jackson Heights with the grandparents, the blond confided the following to his godfather (meant to stand happen in parental stead on matters not merely of faith and morals but, hey, the tricky stuff): “I finally understand what a girl is talking about when she says she sometimes feels like a piece of meat, with men mentally undressing her. God, what a deal!”
The older kept his counsel; he’d always been the silent sentinel.
But back to Chad.
“When I came back from New York, I was recognized. Something had happened to me there, something that gave me status . . . power . . . ascendancy.”
“On Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“I never worked Santa Monica. A guy picked me up there once when I was just walking along on my way to the baths on Ivar. Took me down Vine past Melrose where Vine becomes Rossmore, down the block from that big Catholic Church to the El Royale.”
“Not the Ravenswood, huh?”
“No, why?”
“Mae West lived at the Ravenswood. Christ the King was her church. She gave them all her old limousines. Hated to see nuns boarding any kind of public transport. Said a nun gives her whole life to God, she should ride around in limousines.”
“Oh, yeah? Cool. Well, this guy at the El Royale’s thing was for us to do it all standing on manhole covers stolen from New York—specially one marked ‘Made in India.’ We spent the whole fucking night on that one practicing all the positions of—”
“Don’t tell me, the Kama Sutra.”
“Yes. Of course he did put orange satin-covered pillows down, but even so the next day my sore ass felt like we’d done it all in bumper cars.
“The next day I had him checked out through the network and discovered he was famous, known in the Industry as a player of the highest standards of artistic integrity, and for that reason had many enemies; he’s dead now.”
“Any idea who got the manhole covers?” QT asked his hosts. No, they didn’t.
“I admire artistic integrity,” Chad continued, off on his own bat. “That’s why I never needed a fluffer, not on the runway, not on the set. In the first place I can do myself. I gave a demonstration once, at a consciousness-raising group over in Encino, and the moderator said, ‘Shit, if I could do that, I’d never leave the house!’ And then when I was first out here doing auditions, I had to go down on Jack Wrangler on the set of Valley Vampire. I was understudying the lead, a strictly vanilla North Hollywood High sophomore type Jack seduced with the promise of no school, no parents, all the boys you want, eternal life. Jack was awesome, a real sweetheart.”
“And your television executive—”
“There won’t be any more offers from him. He made the big one, and got turned down. One Friday afternoon, instead of dropping me at my corner, he took me to his place in the desert. Rancho Mirage.”
“And offered to make you—”
“An honest whore. No more grasping, no more lies, no more cover backgrounds—they’re called legends in spy work, and we do that too, you know, when we’re trusted. We develop scenarios and assume a silhouette; it’s exciting, and there’s lots of it happening in Los Angeles—sort of like in The Maltese Falcon, you know.”
“The Maltese Falcon is set in San Francisco,” Author bravely countered. No reaction, not so much as a “whatever.” He was, it seemed, neither to be interrupted nor deterred.
“I remember I was talking about Dan Di Cioccio—you know, from Boys in the Sand and Bob and Darryl and Tex and Alex? Saying something like I aspire to his quality—he went to the Yale School of Drama, you know.”
“Yes, I do. I was his classmate. We called him ‘Pecs,’” Author responded.
“Really.” (Spoken as only a habituated West Hollywood gayboy can; in Los Angeles, in the immortal words of Fran Lebowitz, “Listening is not the opposite of talking; the opposite of talking is waiting.”) “I guess the truth is I went to the Yale School of Drama too—the Joseph Yale School of Drama, Sex Garage campus.”
Clever, no question; real possibilities, as they say, although for what is never specified. As if Author could do anything for the boy, except perhaps save his life (a commonplace fantasy).
“I told him—the executive, that is, not Dan; I’d’ve been anything, done anything with Dan—I didn’t really groove on being a backstreet wife, and then I said if he really loved me he’d bankroll me in a remake—of Back Street, right—that I’d call Back Alley Boy, an All-American story.”
Handler One: “We’re all very patriotic about American queer video.”
Chad: “French, German and Danish stuff is absolute shit; lesser nations co-opting our system to benefit from our developed goods and services without shouldering the responsibilities of the greatest world superpower in history. Opening America to all kinds of foreign influences and diseases in order to destabilize our burgeoning economy and to subvert our technological advancement. I hate that.”
“So you use only American product.”
“I don’t use it myself—I make use of it. One of my clients, this sixty-year-old professor, teaches the Philosophy of Aesthetics. When I first came out, that meant a teacher at a beauty school to me, so you can see how far I’ve come.”
Handler Two: “The professor wrote a deeply cool book: That’s Zentertainment: Detachment and the Politics of Enlightenment.”
Chad: “Zen-tertainment, get it?”
Author: “Got it.”
“I tried to get it at Book Soup on Sunset; they said it was a rarity, but they’d let me know when it turned up. Looked at me funny; I think it’s a cult thing. Maybe I was supposed to add a password or something like that.”
“Yes, probably.”
“Whatever. Anyway, we’re sitting here naked, watching Forbidden Letters, with Richard Locke. It’s by Arthur Bressan, who is a genius. I know him. So he starts getting all theoretical about Arthur. ‘The angles, the way the arms and legs, buttocks, round heels, scrotums and members are disposed, like separate body parts in that soft light.’ I kept on smiling.”
(And so did I.)
“‘You are not like the others,’ he told me, while his Super 8 camera rolled and I masturbated on a mirror-top table while watching a clip of the Christy twins fucking. ‘You are not like the others,’ he said, ‘whose expressions vary only a little from hope to greed to desperation; your most characteristic expressions are too intricate to be easily read.’ That professor taught me a lot.”
“Like the French Ventriloquist.”
(Vacant smile—so much more appealing, really, than a knowing one.)
“You’re from New York, right? Do you know anything about Washington? Most New Yorkers know about Washington Square, and that’s about it. Do you know how they operate there?”
“No. I haven’t been in Washington since the Civil Rights March. Why don’t you tell me all about it—that is, if it’s not too compromising, or too dangerous.”
Handler One: “It’s not dangerous; he’s a Republican.”
Chad: “We get flown back there all the time. Some lobbyist picks up a video, or gets sent our prospectus, and next thing you know, love slave, baby, with surveillance twenty-four/seven.”
“Wearing?”
“They wear out before we do—all on taxpayers’ money.”