Atomic Eel, Twentieth-Century Boy

Early June. It’s been raining for two weeks, everything very green. I’m going to summer school at the U of M to make up eight credits. Astronomy and sociology. Because Parsons is just an art school and my parents insist that I get a BFA. These two courses were conceived for stupid football players, I was told, “snap” courses that anyone could pass. They sure are boring. I doodle during class and never read my textbooks. My dad drives me there in the morning in his LeBaron convertible.

Wayward lass Lainie has got hair that smells like a haystack. She looks like she may not be playing with an entirely full deck. Her femme-fatale contours shifting under a thin dress (she’s wearing a duck dress—you can see up her quack), her wobbly eyes in a faraway gaze. She’s listening to Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else.” She’s got a scab on her elbow from roller-skating down Hennepin Avenue. Always the center of attention. She decides on a bath, so I sit on the pot to watch her naked eighteen-year-old self wash her hair. I smoke a Gauloises. Splish splash. I think of Bonnard. I think of Piccoli watching Bardot in Contempt. She’s laughing and being her dizzy self. We go out dancing, where she causes a scene, spills her drinks, gets in fights, plays aloof, flirts, apologizes. Later in bed we iron out all the disharmony with gentle lovemaking, while a rainstorm rages outside. I knot her dirty brown curlies between my knuckles, squeeze her hand as she lets go. Everything is said in the bed.

Jimmy and I go see The Conformist, which blows our minds. Dominique Sanda pulling down her leotard and saying, “Embrace me.” Jean-Louis Trintignant so good. It’s been thirty years since WWII.

Summer films

Last Tango in Paris

The Conspirators (Hedy Lamarr)

A Place for Lovers (Dunaway and Mastroianni)

Arsène Lupin

Last Year at Marienbad

Night and the City

Stolen Kisses

Dillinger (Michelle Phillips)

Belle de Jour

The Mackintosh Man (Sanda)

Murmur of the Heart

The Return of the Thin Man

When Dad gets home from work, I say, “How’s everything in the salt mines?” He says, “Thanks for remembering, Son.” He puts on some classical music, then changes the record. “I hate sopranos,” he says, sipping at his martini. He tells me that for every fifty dollars he gives me, he’s got to earn a hundred and twenty. Taxes. We watched Goodbye Mr. Chips with Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark and he got sad. “Is it because it’s about the new replacing the old?” I ask. He looked across the room at me, dressed in my sailor suit, and his eyes got like a basset hound’s, and he said, “Yes.” He told me I don’t meet the requirements of leading a happy, successful life. “You’ve resisted instruction as early as you could talk.” He’s appalled that I don’t wear underwear. He says I’m too critical and cynical. He’s afraid I’m stoic. Mom’s drunk and tries to summarize as if I weren’t in the room, ends by saying, “In spite of the fact that you’re a whole lot of trouble, we still love you.” I feel queasy.

Records

On the Boards, Taste

About Us, Stories

Earthbound, King Crimson

Last Tango in Paris, Gato Barbieri

New York Dolls

Vintage Violence, John Cale

Pigmy, Keith Christmas

Mott, Mott the Hoople

Summer reading

Poems, Cavafy

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote

The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth

Justine, Lawrence Durrell

La Maison de Rendez-vous, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Claudine, Colette

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser, Aubrey Beardsley

Ashenden, Somerset Maugham

Parties, Carl van Vechten

Hunger, Knut Hamsun

The Big Knockover, Dashiell Hammett

All our gang are concerned about the extent of our drinking. We all talk about how we are not alcoholics. But it is so addictive. It’s everywhere. Aren’t we too young?

There’s three billion people in the world right now, more than all the other humans since time began. The world’s doubled since I was born. Not good.

Got my grades from Bard, honors in painting, pass in drawing, B minus in Victorian Literature, C minus in Medieval Art.

Sherlock Holmes said your mind is like a living room—you furnish it to your own specific needs, but most people put just any old lumber in there.

Kramer’s new flophouse. Three sneaky-looking Siamese cats in the front yard, broken-down porch in back. He’s got a cute girlfriend called Pauline. It’s like she’s on Spanish fly all the time, pulling me into the bathroom during a party for a wet kiss and a feel. She’s from the wrong side of the tracks. I’ve read books about girls like her, with titles like Teenage Tramp.

To be young and in Minneapolis in 1973. Down at Suttons, they’re using amyl nitrate inhalers (poppers), which makes your heart explode. Lainie is the obnoxious belle of the ball. “Hey, punk,” I say in greeting. “Oh, baby,” she replies. She blinks dumbly, offers me her tongue.

Back at her apartment she sat naked at her dressing table. Lit a cigarette. Looking so young and pretty, her smudged face, her slender arms raised to do up her flaxen hair. She laughed, wrinkling her nose. A marvelous creature caught in the embryonic stage of her development. Filled with flights of fancy, believing in the absurd. I approach her and gently rubbed her shallow ribs, her white flanks. She tapped with her bare feet on the carpet.

We are students of love, entangled with possessiveness, feeding on jealousy and lust. Oh, the messy debris of our lives! We are all in the process of unraveling. “It’s too good to waste,” as Joni Mitchell says.

At the country club lying in a chaise longue by the aquamarine kidney-shaped pool. The umbrellas are a faded blue; they blow over in electrical storms. Watching the seventeen-year-old girls walk by in their shocking-pink bikinis. I launched a mechanical submarine in this pool when I was a kid. Gone now. The girls walk by again, brushing against my old blue White Stag jacket, then park themselves behind me. Wet explosion of a lean muscleman springing off the high dive, doing a can opener, splashing up a spray of chlorine and sending the inner tubes adrift. A blonde in a yellow bikini, the cups held together with a large white ring, is doing the frog stroke, smiles at me with white teeth, glistening in the sunlight. When she climbs the ladder to get out, I spy, through my sunglasses, the yellow triangle from which a tuft of damp hairs protrude. Poolside voyeurism.

July 4. Smoke pot with Jimmy in the country-club bathhouse at nine p.m., getting ready for fireworks. Smells of wet towels. The pool is lit up in the dark, eerie turquoise glow, so we dive in, feels very sensual. Jenny Brown is there, tripping on acid with her posse. Kramer is dressed as a firecracker, black tights, red glitter, red hair, a huge silver wick coming out of the top of his head. Not afraid of making a fool of himself. He terrorizes the little girls, who then decide he is just a harmless madman. They start laughing and hitting him. The fireworks explode over the fairway of the golf course, big champagne bursts that sizzle down the night sky. Pale comets gliding up, glittery gold wafting down. Oh, yeah!

Jordan came to visit on her way back east after a dance summer school in Colorado. Despite her niceness and beauty, I wasn’t into it. Poor thing. All she wanted was a sweet sexy summer romance. My drunkenness was a problem. I hit the garage with my dad’s car one night pulling in. She snuck into my room in her sheer nightie after we’d all gone to bed, wanting more physicality, and I sent her back upstairs. Cruel. I drove her to the airport; she was in tears. I was a cad.

More cruelty. My old high-school chum Laurie drives me to school some days, as she’s going to summer school as well. I smoke her cigarettes and play with the car radio as she prattles on about how sophisticated she’s become, and do I think we’ll have an affair (I sure hope not), and tells me about masturbating with a Coke bottle in front of her boyfriend on a camping trip and did I think that was perverse? I just stared out the window and said, “I don’t know.”

Led Zeppelin at St. Paul Civic Center. I was hopped up on Pernod and amphetamines. Mashed in the crowd of eighteen thousand while the band unleashed their powerful dark magick. The lighting was like Ready Steady Go! Jimmy Page was amazing, so psychedelic. We were put into a collective, erotic spell. A sweet little rock ’n’ roller of sixteen came wordlessly into my arms (such is the power of Page’s witchcraft), grinding her crotch against my hips, and she was busty and suntanned and wore silver eye shadow and kissed me with abandon. They played for three hours. This was no ordinary rock show, this was alchemy! We left, bathed in sweat.

In May, 56,800 kids showed up for Led Zep in Tampa, largest audience for a single act ever. Half the world is under the age of fifteen.

Rock ’n’ Roll Lust, continued. The Hurricane Boys are hired to play at some experimental hippie farm. Three hundred freaks. I’m souped up on white crosses. There are twenty kegs of beer. There’s high-school crush Rachel, scampering through the fields. There’s cute Little Black Betty, once an innocent in a velvet cape, now a super–teenage-ruin, rumored to be a sadomasochist and suffering heroin shakes. The band shows up with another drummer, tells me I’ve been replaced. Traitors! These were my best friends! Cowards! I’m bummed out. Electric guitars are raging.

Beautiful Jenny Brown comes over with an inch of bourbon for me. She feels sorry for me. Says in her husky voice, “Don’t worry about it—those guys are just a bunch of assholes.” Then she leans in and starts kissing me. “God, I go for you just like the rest of your fans.” The two of us look like brother and sister. Amidst all the chaos and screaming we stole off to the six-foot-tall bulrushes, lie down on the trampled reeds, which created our own small enclosure. The full moon had risen, which created a blue glow. We doffed our garments, white cotton (her), black leather (me). Her body was brown, except for the pale tan line around her breasts and divine pubis, where her bathing suit had been. She stood over me and I looked up at her flat, muscular stomach. Euphoria! We lay tasting and caressing for an hour in our own private domain. You never know what the day will bring.

Jenny called up a couple days later, and says she likes me now that I’m not a Hurricane Boy—now that I’m “outta that mess,” as she put it. She tells me about her rabbits, Curly and Rags. She wants to make it clear that she is not picking me up. Says she’s not like all the other dumb girls who chase me. She’s the original mixed-up kid. But she does seem to have the power to draw me out of my body and into her own.

We meet at the Lake Harriet band shell. I look at her tomboy getup, her high cheekbones, her deliciously sculpted nose, her strong chin, her long brown shag. She holds me from behind, kisses my neck, whispering that we are incompatible. “Are you always suave, or are you ever just normal?” she says accusingly.

I remember her from the private girls’ school, where she wore a navy-blue uniform. She told me she didn’t want to fuck me, then took me home and did just that, on the kitchen floor right next to the refrigerator. When she removed her undies she said she had enough hair on her vagina for three girls. We were quiet so as to not wake her sleeping parents. Such a beautiful look on her face, smiling with her eyes closed. After another bourbon, we slipped down to the dark basement for a second bout on a green exercise mat on the floor.

We meet at Al’s Bar on Excelsior Boulevard on a sunny afternoon. She’s a regular. She’s hunched over a glass of bourbon. She asks if I’m tricking her.

“Well, the tricks you pull are the same ones I pull,” she says, lighting a cigarette. Nothing is simple with her. Distrustful Jenny.

…this sceptered Isle

This earth of majesty…

This other Eden…

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea…

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings

Feared by their breed and famous by their birth…

My parents are away. American Bar Association convention in Washington. I’m feeling sad and romantic listening to the deeply melancholic Last Tango soundtrack while drinking a brandy-and-ginger. Getting myself into a right state. Romantic agony building up.

I wonder if I have emphysema.

I wonder if my crabs are gone.

I wonder if Jenny really loves me. (Her Bard boyfriend is shooting heroin because he “misses her.”)

I wonder if I can paint well, write well.

I wonder how much I can see.

I wonder if I can ever give myself completely to another.

I wonder when the New York Dolls album is coming out.

I wonder what I’ll be like in five years.

I wonder if things are getting better or worse.

I wonder what Bryan Ferry is doing right now.

I wonder if I see myself at all objectively.

I wonder if this is corny.

I wonder if I should make myself another drink.

I wonder if I will flunk my astronomy test. (I did.)

One evening Kurt was over, we were sitting in the backyard drinking cocktails and smoking. “Hey, I got an idea, let’s put your mom’s clothes on,” said Kurt. So we went in her closet, and both picked out dresses, mine with big polka dots. We smeared on some lipstick and went back outside with a couple of fresh cocktails, laughing all the way. We both have long hair, but we still made a couple of homely-looking women. Big yucks. No big deal. But…a few days after my parents got home my mom came into my room with a troubled look on her face.

“What are you talking about?” I said, at a loss to figure out whatever evidence I had failed to conceal.

“Someone’s been wearing my clothes. I had two dresses fresh from the dry cleaners, and now they smell of body odor. Plus my cosmetics are all a jumble. What kind of weird girl did you have here?” she said, truly upset.

“Um…I was bored, and I thought it would be funny. It was. You should’ve seen me,” I joked.

“No it’s not. It’s not like it turned me on or anything. It was hilarious.” She asked what I did for footwear and I told her I kept my sweat socks on. That made her laugh. Whew. Close call.

Jenny comes over and we exchange love vows. She reminds me of Eloise of the Plaza. Except that Jenny has more deviant games.

One day, after my morning class at the U. I took the bus to her parents’ house on Humboldt. I climb three flights of white-carpeted stairs with the framed lithographs on the walls, into Jenny’s private wing, where she is sleeping on her stomach, her broad back exposed. I stoop and smell her, feeling a little fragile and out of place. She slowly wakes, and grumbles sleepily, “Why can’t I have you?”

She says, “No, I mean all of you. Why can’t I have all of you?” I climb in with her, and afterwards she says, “I love having boys come in me.” “Boys,” plural. She dumbfounds me. She says she’s used to being the queen bee.

Later that night, we go see Song of the Thin Man. Nora is mixing drinks and Asta is prancing around merrily. Jenny leans over and whispers in my ear, “Mister, you can fuck me any time you want to.” Wow. What a gal. No one can say “fuck” with quite the resonance she can.

Minnesota is on the cover of Time magazine (which I grew up with). Says it’s the best place to live in the US. I can’t wait to leave.

Two summers ago I was in Naples, standing on street corners looking up narrow alleyways that climbed the hill precipitously, pennants of washing crisscrossing the way. I stood on the shore looking at the burnished sea, Capri faintly outlined against the horizon. I wandered idly, with the eye of an innocent (sort of). Seems like ages ago. Whatever happened was absolute.