Read Online Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch - Free Book Online Page B

chamber of Hell, there was the Minotaur, and there was my identity. While other teen boys around me in public high school were budding, showing off newly grown penises and weeds of pubic hair, I was zipped-up and buttoned-down. From the time I ate whipped cream and a maraschino cherry off Bobby’s thing, making it a sundae when I was thirteen, not much happened until I came to college in Manhattan. I inhabited a physical and romantic flatland. When I finally found my way to the Gay Lounge in the basement of my dorm, Furnald Hall—while the rest of the students were protesting Vietnam, we “sat in” at the dean’s office to demand sticks of university-issue lounge furniture—I found other boys with adolescent libidos stunted and mesmerized by the same dark psychodramas, and we finally kissed.
    Yet Howard brought me up short with his distress at my continuing casual hookups. He was ostensibly much hipper. He wore black jeans, black T-shirts, smoked lanky cigarettes out of the side of his mouth, and was snide, funny, and sarcastic. I often felt likean ordinary television laugh track next to his biting Lenny Bruce running commentary. He, likewise, knew well that he was a refugee from ordinary first love. He was not delusional. But he came to different conclusions. “After eating my heart out over Rick, torturing myself for a year, I haven’t a great capacity for pain,” was the funny-bitter way he put it to me when I’d hurt him. Especially odd to remember was his great argument for monogamy, related somehow to his Russian-Jewish grandparents. “I want monogamy and I want the rewards that come from sacrificing for each other,” he’d say in so many words, while I’d slump in the armchair. “I haven’t had sex with anyone but you for months and months, and never in New York.” (I noted the nuance of “ never in New York” but didn’t pursue.) Odd that seductive, Loki-like Howard in the middle of this maelstrom of erotic acting-out should have been voicing traditional wishes, while I put a utopian spin on the behavior, making it some kind of romantic quest or political action. And so we went on debating these two great alternatives periodically in our living room, like characters in a current gay allegory, our issues reflecting those of many other couples trying to work out love in an unruly time.
    My nun-therapist Sister Mary Michael was blasé as I discussed my heated escapades over the years in her tower room at the Cathedral. (By now, Tim Dlugos was seeing her as well, and wrote a sestina, “Close,” as he sat in the Cathedral close waiting for my session to wind up and his to begin: “We share a therapist up there three stories. / I’m here to recollect, and recollect I shall, / but first let me get over this amazing blue.”) She actually emboldened and enabled my behavior, with her questioning of how it made me feel, or whether Howard had dealt with x or y yet, or the question of control, and other heady bits of analysis worthy of Scenes from aMarriage. I clearly remember one comment: “Over the years, partners in couples often change roles.” A clue to one of those invisible x ’s or y ’s at play, not yet known to me, came up about that time. A message on our machine was from William, doing his W. C. Fields drawl, saying, “Howard, could you bring over three lightbulbs when you come?” Lightbulbs? Howard sidestepped, explaining that the “lightbulbs” were actually bags of heroin. Over the next decade we switched roles quite a few times. I was not always the libertine. He definitely was not always Moses the Judge. Rather, we were both addicts, needing our separate escape hatches from life and love, me with sex, he drugs. So we swerved, but also colluded in staying on track.
    There, I’ve said it. And having spoken, the finger moves on, as it did in our life together. Every so often we would simultaneously freak out from the pressure of rapidly changing atmospheres, our present so unlike our