MANHATTAN 2

 

Back then, I could sniff out signs of the initiatory mind in both art and perversion; only later would I realize this was the equivalent of burning down an apartment just to cook a steak. Authentic initiation requires a controlled fire, in the right place, but nothing that serves as motivation for any kind of reactionary prudishness. Melissa's family thought she was the Devil's daughter; through her, I learned about those apartments where a bunch of people huddled in corners would get high and list the city's heroin channels for each other. I would only use four times in my life: and by the way, they were all very good. "The problem with those apartments is that there's always someone wanting to sleep with you, and you're only there for the drugs, right?" Melissa said. "'TV Eye' is a term girls use for men looking at them with lustful eyes, like in the Iggy Pop song (Twat Vibe Eye: eating look). I've got one, look. I commented, putting on my new fighter pilot jacket and kissing her neck. "But you just ate me," she replied. "I'd do it again if it wasn't my turn." And we left, me trying to convince her to go home and study instead of hanging around that pizza place on the corner of 7th Street and Second Avenue, where a bunch of hard-core criminals were turning dust into money. Even the air seemed clearer and more transparent that late afternoon, leaving a used bookstore with the English copy of The Doctrine of No Mind (by Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, which I'd given to Melissa) and catching the bus on Riverside Drive in that long hour of daylight. We talked a little about Miss Berman: I told Melissa that, except when she had some truly beautiful private thought to occupy my ears, I was finding her lectures less and less bearable; how tiring it was in theoretical matters (entire mornings would disappear in a haze inside my head while Miss Berman speculated on contemporary art: the dark glasses covering her blue eyes, the cultivation of true good taste giving way to confused ideologies about sex and politics. "I'd love to be able to talk more and give little speeches filled with quotations, I want to see if I can develop that," she told me one day (appointment to the Arts Council was her lifelong goal). But I confess that sometimes her silliness pleased and amused me: "I told him my friend's name was Elsa Holzer, she was about forty but looked thirty, and that she was looking for a 'casual fuck,' and you know what he said? (Miss Berman asked me, laughing) "He said, 'Tell your friend she's in the wrong town, everyone in New York is gay.'" she told me, reminding me that Tennessee Williams was once asked if he was gay and he replied, "Well, let's just say I walk the pier." Elza Holzer was a light-skinned brunette from Cincinnati, short, round, and full-figured, who taught political philosophy at Hunter College and advocated the idea that a mass society was incapable of producing interesting criminals, and was always quoting Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" to justify the suppression of "great individuals" from the surface of the world. She lived with her legs tucked in She was wearing black tights to hide a small varicose vein on her calf, and I found it attractive the night I walked through the rain to the Biltmore Hotel for dinner at the Overseas Press Corps. Sitting at the bar in the dim light, Elsa stretched one curved foot forward like a ballerina and rested a plump little fist on her hips. “Didn’t Elsa’s father die and leave her a huge brokerage firm?” Melissa asked me later, and I couldn’t answer. Elsa had a friendly, sober, and tender smile, with clean, shiny teeth and dark green eyes that held no malice; a clumsy, good-natured, cheerful creature, full of good intentions, but boring; she lived in a house on 72nd, and when I saw her in the light, I was disheartened. That night, Victor Blythe showed up with Barbara Berenson, pretending to be a rich, festive couple, tearing up money under the stars; he offered me cocaine, and I declined; then she said she had a pickup truck in her room, and I declined; Elsa Holzer and Miss Berman were talking to Barbara about her new topic for her art magazine, Androgyny, and also an exhaustive report on who owned which famous paintings in the United States. I could see Miss Berman trying to consider everything under the sun with a Germanic, but misguided, stubbornness. Who are your parents? Do you like girls? Where did you learn to speak Italian? Where were you on 9/11? Berman said you write: about what?—his "banality" wasn't just socializing cosmetics, it was the existential void itself speaking; I wondered if there was a better way to discreetly humiliate a fraudulent publicist than to make his imagination seem commonplace and ordinary, nauseating and worthless. His political views were horrifying, and when he suggested that John Kennedy was corrupt, I simply said, out of spite and without offering any argument, "No, he wasn't."—but pseudo-intellectuals in the media don't usually grasp the full scope of the sarcasm in my political analyses: they simply absorb my ramblings through my literary work and snort like dying pigs. And when they also happen to be gay, they always expect me to actually be the evil, perverted hero who came from the other world just to screw them. Arguments! Explanations! "Now let's go up to my room and have some fun," Victor Blyhte said, extending the invitation to all of us. I thought of his little red-haired boys. Barbara stood before me in the elevator.