Thank God I was born with dark hair and sunglasses.
* * *
The first time I
visited the observation deck of the
* * *
Old movie theaters, especially pornographic ones, have a stale odor of dissolution about them which enchants me. It’s as though all of the people who have haunted them leave behind some residue: a pertinacious slime of desire that permeates carpets, seats, walls and curtains.
* * *
Curled up in bed with
a dreamy man and a cocaine hangover in
“Tienes los ojos tristes,” he said, touching and regarding my face. “Pero me gustan,” he added. After a pause: “¿Todo el mundo te ha dicho eso?”
I shook my head. “Nadie.”
“¿Pero ya lo sabías?” I nodded and we both laughed.
* * *
You have no idea how perverse it is of me to indulge in sentimentality.
* * *
“Cadaver”: the word came into my mind as I lay on the examining table covered by a disposable pink paper sheet the nurse had drawn up to my shoulders. The image didn’t seem unpleasant or frightening: I envisioned a rubbery yellow mass, free of nervousness, anxieties and thoughts, into which my living body could recline.
* * *
As soon as I found out that paranoiacs are always right, I abandoned paranoia and tried to find some other way of looking at the world.
* * *
The Epoch of Area and the Pyramid Lounge (Before the Plague): it is impossible to convey to people who did not experience it the emotion of being in those places at that time: it was not theater or fiction or film but all of these at once. It was as though everyone carried his own dreams into a structured madness for the sake of the party, for the sake of the excess, for sake of the theater—and nothing else. What appeared on the surface to be the greatest vanity and decadence was actually a certain kind of generosity and nobility and elegance. We fed on it voraciously.
For many years now
the level of art and energy seems to me to have diminished; nothing like it
here, nothing like it in
I was willfully deluded enough to fantasize that through “Joyride” I might be able to bring it all to life again single-handedly. But what a splendid delusion it was!
* * *
I would that my characters had materialized out of the air of New York with the same ancient mysteriousness, perfection of form, and lack of malice as an aggregation of reef sharks.
* * *
My poor little texts dropped into nothingness like dimes into a wishing well...
* * *
My imitation game: to be someone else in some way for only a moment: imitation without mockery: a kind of tender, explosive, fleeting caricature...
* * *
If only you knew the pleasure I get sometimes from looking at handsome men after I’ve had a few beers.
* * *
Damien and the ugly Kachina Doll: it was not the thing itself that delighted me, but rather the thing given life by Damien’s eyes.
* * *
In social situations, among strangers, what often paralyzes me is the apprehension (whether real or imagined) of some kind of invisible leakage: a fear that the social atmosphere is contaminated by something other than tenderness.
* * *
Poem: Closet Leather Queen
One day you’ll see, in full regalia,
My genitalia.
* * *
My ‘failing’: it seems to me that I don’t have the constitution to be a good conductor of beauty. (‘Conductor’ in the electronic and perhaps also in the musical sense.) And so, as always, I must continue to try to create for myself a body with a higher and finer conductivity, and, if this proves to be futile, I must continue still, not out of heroism, but out of love (the kind of transcendent love I felt when I walked with my brother on the trail in Hot Springs, Arkansas, near the hotel my grandfather built).
* * *
. . . Like most narratives of dreams, the one I have just been moved to record is of no consequence, nor was the memory of the dream particularly clear or meaningful. It is only a residue that intrigues me: I woke up in a state between pleasure and chagrin, realizing that I was awake and therefore the dream could not continue, and after a few moments trying to return to it, to recall the emotion, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I woke up one day and found that a certain subtle mutation had occurred, so that I had now the kind of consciousness I desired.
A consciousness quick and full of color as the motions of birds: refined, arch, playful: housed in this same body more or less, but suffused with elegance and ease. For a few moments I fantasized that the mutation had occurred and savored the sweet pleasure it would give me.
* * *
What I have been lamenting so often and so profoundly is my inability (because I am human? because I am weak-minded? because I am untalented?) to remember and remain faithful to the beauty that I have seen, beauty which once nourished me, and which I promised myself always to cherish. I am not worthy of what I saw yesterday or only a few hours ago.
* * *
Rambling thoughts
inside an infamous playhouse: 100º in
The importuning person, the erstwhile shy person, who, in this place—not where anything is possible, but where more is possible—is able to extend the limits of what he thought himself capable, to bend himself and snap back into a new shape, to fill himself with images and sensations that to him seem sweet and rare and unearthly...
* * *
Fragments of a trip
to
Ironic refrain in
Is that all there
is? Is that all there is?
If that’s all
there is, my friend,
Then let’s keep
dancing
Let’s break out
the booze
And have a ball
If that’s all
There is...
But all of that was really of no importance. (I had remarked in myself the existence now of two opposing selves: the one bound up in anxious childish pursuit of beautiful tanned faces and muscled bodies and elegant people and places; the other, childlike and nourished only in solitude, moved nearly to tears by the beauty of a tree or the light of evening; the two selves mortal enemies and yet each endeavoring to be indulgent of the other.)
What mattered was: the sumptuous bank of blue-green sea I could view from the window of the hotel whenever I chose; taking pleasure in the way the air felt and smelled in the day and during the night.
What mattered was: the rambling walk I made past the lovely freshly painted houses of the Española Way (the excitement of being in a place which, no matter how fake and disappointing its architecture might seem in the end, still had the virtue of being of a unified vision, rejoicing in form and color), over to the quiet bay on the opposite side of the island (in contrast with the continual commotion of the waves at the beach), and then back through the park, experiencing for the first time the sensation of walking under a banyan tree with reddish vines hanging down like hair, as though I had entered a fairy-tale.
What mattered was: resting in the room in the afternoon on the cool sheets.
What mattered
was: while I was taking sun on the
beach, asking myself, with mock-exasperation, why I had to remind myself to
contemplate the beauty of the ocean; wondering whether I liked the ocean at
all. Perhaps it was the ashen color and
texture of the sand that spoiled it for me, because it seemed to lie
unpleasantly like a cinerarium dividing the vivid ocean and the shapely procession
of the hotels on
(I prefer the red
diamond granules of Race Point in
Imagine deciding it would be impossible to move to a place on account of the color of the sand!
In
As I observed him I became less and less reserved and more and more amorous. The emotion I felt was not the kind of predatory titillation of encountering a possible sex partner: it reached down to something rarer and more lyrical.
He left his friends to go to the men’s room. Without hesitation, in a spirit of amorous play, I followed him in.
He stopped by the sink, and I stood behind him inconsequently. He thought that I was trying to get by him to the urinal and so politely moved aside. Wearing a big unabashed grin, I said, “Actually I followed you in here because I wanted to meet you.”
To my surprise he seemed not in the least thrown off balance, as though he were accustomed to such importunate behavior. And he responded with a self-effacing modesty and directness that threw me for a loop.
“I’m going to
The exchange was all a matter of a minute or two. I don’t recall what more I may have said or how I may have looked. But I do remember that at one point he turned his face toward me in an unconscious elegant motion that revealed to me, not only the exquisite ocean green of his eyes, but also a complete beauty that was simply a rapture.
The nightclub itself, which till that moment I had found somewhat unpleasant, suddenly seemed enchanted as though by the presence of a faun. In my mind’s eye, alone in the men’s room, I contemplated my memory of that movement of the head, which had seemed to leave a kind of multiple trail in space.
Most of the night, and for days after, I thought about this extraordinary image and reveled in semi-ironic fantasies of hellfire, damnation and financial ruination.
I don’t think he had an iota as to his own divinity or to the effect he had had on me. Or perhaps he did; perhaps he had seen it often before.
I tried to convey something of all this to my traveling companion, but apparently he couldn’t see anything of what I saw in the boy. He saw me as just going on silly and romantic about something I had failed to pick up. This made me wonder whether there really was anything there objectively; whether the richness was all in my imagination and the boy was merely like any other good-looking boy.
I wonder what in the
world he could have thought of me. He
seemed willing enough to rendezvous with me if it hadn’t been for the fact that
he was going to
Did he think I was
only another
I just wish I could have been with him long enough to gain a stronger impression: for the exchange was so brief that I found that after only a few days I could no longer remember exactly what his face looked like and, sadder still, I lost the precise memory of the green-eyed sweep of his head that had seemed to me to be of supernatural grace and fineness, like the perfection of a flower in bloom. I wish I could preserve it forever.
* * *
I loved the two of them so much that (after a time) I didn’t mind the odor of ferret droppings or the absence of air in their tiny apartment; or their taking me specially to walk in that dreadful shopping mall (what could they have been thinking!); or the displeasure they caused me by burning incense on the little patio as we ate the really good Mexican dinner I had cooked for us.
It is amazing how the love we have for our friends can be so great as to absorb and dissolve the incredible collisions and antagonisms of our own neurotic tastes and desires.
And all the charming questions they asked me about myself! And how I relished playing the role (writer? intellectual? professor of love and taste? homosexual wit? adorable failure?)! And yet somehow there was nothing false and everything pleasurable about our conversation.
* * *
The ritual of working out in the gym is for me a kind of monasticism. (It could as easily have been ballet, a sport, a martial art, or any other activity to build grace and strength and confidence in the body.) It is a kind of congenial penance to correct the sin of my youth, which was to starve my body of suppleness and confidence, to prostrate myself before images of masculine beauty, to snatch the whip from the hand of others and flay myself a thousandfold, to make ease and happiness in my body impossible.
But even though I have now achieved something, though I have changed and sculpted my body into a form that resonates with my desires, and even though I have to some extent reached an ease of mind that expresses itself through my body, even so I despair over my lanky frame, my scars, the hateful unnatural delicacy of my hands.
* * *
What a sad history it would be to tell of all the seismic eruptions and ragings of my skin over the years and the suffering it has caused me. Yesterday I looked at my skin in the mirror and actually felt a kind of relief in knowing that someday it will fall from my bones and disintegrate forever. It will be over. This was not mere morbidity or childish self-hatred (not that I am exempt from either of these sins): I think it may have shown a kind of wisdom.
* * *
I have just finished going over my synopsis and some of the fragments of “Joyride.” I had been putting this off for months; you might even say I’ve been putting it off for over a year. I had been hopeful of being able to go beyond my fear and discouragement, “pick up the pieces” and somehow finish it, wrap it up, even if the result were far from perfect. To have done with it. I had written a little bit which I thought might be a good beginning of a bridge for part of it.
But now I think I see finally that whatever it was in me that was producing that work is gone, or at least changed forever. I tried to start up the mechanism in my body as though revving up a motorcycle engine (that’s the image I used to have in the mornings): Nothing. I tried again, almost laughing at the pathos of it. That exuberance, that jubilation, the almost superhuman perseverance that kept me going day after day for a year—I can no longer summon it. I’m not so pessimistic as to think that it will never return, but for now I must resign myself to a different kind of writing.
I have been defeated in this. By the lack of a quiet place to write? By “circumstances”? By my laziness and self-disgust? What does it matter. It comes to me now as a kind of relief.
I feel as though I must mourn the loss. But perhaps that’s what I’ve been doing for the past year without really knowing it.
I do, however, feel a duty toward the work: I must collect and edit the best of the fragments. I don’t know whether I should show them to others or not. It seems a shame to let the ideas die in obscurity. Perhaps I can infect someone else with my dreams, or at least let others know that I have dreamt.
* * *
Reflections after watching a program about the Zionist underground during World War II:
For many years I did everything I could to avoid the study of history. I note in myself now three kinds of passions that open a way into it:
a passion for beautiful males (footage of exuberant Jewish youths performing calisthenics in a military training camp): a passion that is perverse, dreamy, ironic, pornographic;
a passion for other kinds of beauty (1940’s black and white footage of a woman and a young boy walking near a beach in bright sunshine): an emotion of pure longing and pathos; and
a passion for knowing the truth (over footage of DeGaulle touring in the Middle East soon after the liberation of Paris, the narrator says that in reality DeGaulle at this point had little military power with which to make a claim for the spoils of the victory, but that he nevertheless gained influence as though by means of his showmanship alone): an emotion of intrigue, a fascination with theatricality.
* * *
I’m so glad I’ve somehow overcome that inner blindness or weakness that made me continually turn beauty into ugliness; that stupidity that made me long to possess beauty rather than merely to see it and celebrate it and perhaps try to record it.
* * *
Till now I had never read Midnight Cowboy, and although Herlihy has been a mythical presence in my life ever since I read a few paragraphs of his (I think they were from All Fall Down) in an anthology in high school, I’m amazed now by how beautiful and simple his prose is and how great an affinity I have for his way of looking at things. It is as though by some magic he expressed perfectly, in the year I was born, things I could not have understood until now, things I have despaired of expressing; and for that I feel a kind of relief and gratitude. (As compared to, say, Rechy, whom I thought I would like but who seems ultimately bad.)
* * *
How often I find that an image that used to excite me erotically without fail now has no effect whatsoever, while novel images that appear to me by chance may connect with some part of myself of which I was scarcely aware, making me feel as though some part of the world which had been previously hidden from me had become suddenly charged and luminous.
In other words, not only do my desires change without my knowing it, but I don’t know what they are until I feel them.
I find also that my desires seem to become more and more aestheticized, specialized, contingent, finicky, as though I expected more and more to satisfy desires others might consider impossible or unrealistic.
This change seems at once a narrowing and heightening. I wonder whether it will be beneficent or catastrophic in terms of my happiness or my flowering or my maturity. It would seem to make me less and less likely to find happiness (though it may, incidentally and paradoxically, make me more and more attractive to others).
I do not know whether the current of my erotic desires runs with or against the current of my romantic desires.
* * *
The satyr in gentleman’s clothing...
* * *
Apropos of a brief
adventure with a guy I picked up as he was cycling by on the street in
. . . In spite of a certain edge of crudity in him (which only spiced it for me) he turned out to be altogether sweet and considerate, even, I fancy, in his unwillingness to linger after the climax. For although I was rather disappointed of my craving for the tender warmth of bodies commingling, when I thought of it later I wondered whether his promptness in leaving was not after all the best of manners.
Was the transaction not complete and perfect in itself? What basis in sentiment could we have, under the circumstances, to try to extenuate it? And, moreover, what more had I in good faith to offer him in exchange for a few hours more of relief from the awful lonesomeness in the marrow of the bones, a relief that is more like a narcotic than a palliative, that sharpens the pain by making one more aware of it.
* * *
The masculine animals I sometimes glimpse in my desire’s eye—nothing is known about them. If only I could so much as intimate their existence....
____________