Read Online Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Brad Gooch
Ads: Link
those guys were drawn to uniforms and to images of controlled violence. Robert plied me with coke until the moment when I’d finally forgotten all about the modeling pictures. Then he decided, “Okay, let’s go in the back.” At that instant he either flipped a switch, becoming a mad scientist versed in mind control, or I imagined that he did, and was too zonked to tell the difference. He set his camera, on a tripod, at crotch height. I stood in piercing sunlight. “Move your index finger a quarter inch to the right,” he’d say. In the final portrait I look like a glazed-over victim of childhood abuse, dressed for a nice restaurant, with a jagged werewolf shadow cast behind—not a photograph designed to charm a fashion market still trading in all-American innocence.
Then things started to swerve off course a bit, after two years of our being together. Revision: Now that I think back, I can clearly see the “private ghosts” that Howard had prophesied all over the Bleecker Street apartment, like ghost-buster photographs that reveal, when developed, a congealed wisp of smoke next to a tea service, obviously the poltergeist that was slamming doors in the middle of the night. I believe the fault was mine. Well, no, I don’t believe, but I feel the fault was mine, though when I mull matters over I understand that we both collaborated. At the time, Howard believed the fault was entirely mine. I, contrarily, believed that there was no such thing as my ever being at fault. I had unlearned any guilty responses from Reichian therapy onwards, learning to honor my every impulse as the natural electricity of my sacred body. A favorite film of ours to see at an art house on the Upper West Side whenever it showed was Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage . Originally a TV series, and supposedly responsible for a spike in divorces in Sweden, the film was a flat sequence of coldly lit monologues or discomfiting dialogues out of couples’ therapy, all shot in suffocating tight frames. If the intense soundtrack wasn’t Anton Webern–screaking-atonal-violin-frequencies—it should have been. Soon enough the mood at Bleecker Street, with its tilted, splintered floors, was that of a self-conscious and introspective Bergman film.
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
The plot point that triggered the shift from Vivaldi major to Webern minor chords, from tonal to atonal, from Bruce Springsteen and Donna Summer to David Bowie’s “Berlin” albums, done with Brian Eno, like Low , playing on the stereo that season, was my pursuit of modeling. It was the snake in the Garden. The threat always hovered that I would soon be abandoning our almost comically cold-water flat, with its traces of carbon monoxide, for a different kind of life, or another lover. If my West Village “clone” life was suspect in year one, modeling put more of a gloss on those early suspicions. “Who are you?” was reintroduced. A sharp inflection could get into Howard’s voice when the topic, mostly left unsaid, insinuated itself. Or, more often, was tried out on third parties. “I notice that Brad has become vainer since he’s been thinking about pursuing a modeling career,” he helpfully told a mutual friend. Anickname that began to stick was “Brooke,” for Brooke Shields, the fourteen-year-old appearing on the cover of Vogue in early 1980 (and, later that year, in a jeans commercial, saying the lines “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”). My eyes “wandered” onto a page that Howard scribbled (we both sent messages this peekaboo way): “I feel threatened by Brad’s going off to exotic places, doing exciting things, meeting interesting people, without me.”
Another insistent issue was sex. I had put together the pieces of my coming-of-age by mythologizing, or politicizing, sex. All those lurid ruby-red-lit rooms I’d stumbled through were scenes, in my mind, from Orpheus Descending , and in the private, last
Then things started to swerve off course a bit, after two years of our being together. Revision: Now that I think back, I can clearly see the “private ghosts” that Howard had prophesied all over the Bleecker Street apartment, like ghost-buster photographs that reveal, when developed, a congealed wisp of smoke next to a tea service, obviously the poltergeist that was slamming doors in the middle of the night. I believe the fault was mine. Well, no, I don’t believe, but I feel the fault was mine, though when I mull matters over I understand that we both collaborated. At the time, Howard believed the fault was entirely mine. I, contrarily, believed that there was no such thing as my ever being at fault. I had unlearned any guilty responses from Reichian therapy onwards, learning to honor my every impulse as the natural electricity of my sacred body. A favorite film of ours to see at an art house on the Upper West Side whenever it showed was Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage . Originally a TV series, and supposedly responsible for a spike in divorces in Sweden, the film was a flat sequence of coldly lit monologues or discomfiting dialogues out of couples’ therapy, all shot in suffocating tight frames. If the intense soundtrack wasn’t Anton Webern–screaking-atonal-violin-frequencies—it should have been. Soon enough the mood at Bleecker Street, with its tilted, splintered floors, was that of a self-conscious and introspective Bergman film.
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
The plot point that triggered the shift from Vivaldi major to Webern minor chords, from tonal to atonal, from Bruce Springsteen and Donna Summer to David Bowie’s “Berlin” albums, done with Brian Eno, like Low , playing on the stereo that season, was my pursuit of modeling. It was the snake in the Garden. The threat always hovered that I would soon be abandoning our almost comically cold-water flat, with its traces of carbon monoxide, for a different kind of life, or another lover. If my West Village “clone” life was suspect in year one, modeling put more of a gloss on those early suspicions. “Who are you?” was reintroduced. A sharp inflection could get into Howard’s voice when the topic, mostly left unsaid, insinuated itself. Or, more often, was tried out on third parties. “I notice that Brad has become vainer since he’s been thinking about pursuing a modeling career,” he helpfully told a mutual friend. Anickname that began to stick was “Brooke,” for Brooke Shields, the fourteen-year-old appearing on the cover of Vogue in early 1980 (and, later that year, in a jeans commercial, saying the lines “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”). My eyes “wandered” onto a page that Howard scribbled (we both sent messages this peekaboo way): “I feel threatened by Brad’s going off to exotic places, doing exciting things, meeting interesting people, without me.”
Another insistent issue was sex. I had put together the pieces of my coming-of-age by mythologizing, or politicizing, sex. All those lurid ruby-red-lit rooms I’d stumbled through were scenes, in my mind, from Orpheus Descending , and in the private, last
Similar Books
