Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).

Review: “William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers” (1 of 2)

I recently watched the documentary William A. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sewers.  I suppose I can call it a documentary, although it contained no commentary; I suppose that is one form of documentary.

It wasn’t particularly unified either.  Instead, it was a collection of short clips, about thirteen as I recall, that ran a total of about fifty-one minutes.  Some of the clips were of Burroughs reading from his writings.  Others were interviews conducted by Jurgen Ploog.  Still others were clips of experimental films featuring Burroughs or his texts.

I find Burroughs more and more interesting, although I expect this phenomenon to flip without warning into boredom.  Although Burroughs interests, he also gently repulses.  I can’t imagine being his friend.  My ultimate reaction is that he was a very odd man.

I first learned of him while reading Jack Kerouac.  Burroughs was the model for the character Old Bull Lee in On The Road.  His persona there was certainly strange.  Kerouac in fact refers to the relationship between Burroughs and his wife “one of the strangest.”  During Kerouac’s visit to Burroughs' house near New Orleans, he observes him and his wife Joan drinking and pretty much taking every drug in the book.  Burroughs gets up in the morning, takes a fix, is lively for awhile, takes another fix, is lively for awhile…..etc.  A few years after the events recounted in On The Road, Burroughs would accidentally kill Joan while trying to shoot a glass off the top of her head a la William Tell.  He later was forced to the “appalling conclusion” that this event drove him to become a writer.  Over the following decades, he became known for novels like Junkie, Queer, and Naked Lunch.  Some of these were written using the “cut-up” method of writing something and then slicing pages in half and rearranging the sequence of half-pages.  

Given the variety and amount of substances that Burroughs took into his system, it is perhaps a miracle that he produced any writing at all.  I haven’t read much of it—I certainly haven’t read Naked Lunch (although I read a few pages from time to time).  Consequently, I can’t judge the coherence of the work.  I know that some people regard Naked Lunch as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.  About all I really know of Burroughs' work is the poem “A Thanksgiving Prayer, November 28, 1986,” which is, if nothing else, memorable.  It is by no means clear that Burroughs is expressing thanks; disgust seems closer to the truth.

And yet, in the mythic Beat trio of Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg/William S. Burroughs, Burroughs seems the ultra-conservative.  Kerouac said that Burroughs harbored a nostalgia for the country as it was around 1910.  He nearly always appeared in a suit and tie.  There is just this little problem of his drug habits and some nasty things he said about his country—he was a cantankerous curmudgeon.  And he outlived both Kerouac and Ginsberg, though older than both.

Review: "The Most Golden Bulgari" (2 of 2)

The story does entertain.  You have the interaction of Djanko and Picano.  You have the comic relief of the expatriate actresses and Mr. Muscle.  You have, as well, the escapades of Djanko’s various friends and hangers on.

And yet…this story also disquiets.  Are these the people one really wants to spend one’s life—or even a year—with?  The expatriates are not stupid—but they do seem superficial.  Picano himself…seems confused, uncertain.  Of course, people are often confused in their early twenties.  But if Picano is looking for love, it’s not clear how well he’s doing.  He seems happy enough with Djanko—at least until he realizes he isn’t.  And when he leaves Rome for a weekend motorcycle trip to France, he realizes how unhappy he actually is and decides never to return; writing a brief letter to inform Djanko of his decision.

And, despite a sexual escapade earlier that causes him to reflect on his betrayal of his “fidelity,” it’s not clear exactly what “fidelity” means to him.  He’d already gone to bed with a variety of men during this year in Rome.  Did any of this sex bring him any closer to love?  Did the sex have any significance at all for him?

Indeed, in common with Edmund White, Picano finds casual sex liberating.  Heading across southern France at the end of this section, Picano has sex with a stranger in Marseille.  “[T]his nameless French sailor taught me that neither love nor even attraction was needed for sex, and that indeed, somehow it became sharper, more encompassing, when it was free of all that.”

The liberation of pure sex—not love, not even attraction; just the experience of sex—what some of us may have experienced in our first solitary childhood masturbations.  Of course, Picano is describing the mid-1960s, well before the era of AIDS—even before Stonewall!  Later, when AIDS surfaced and people were urged to “know your partners,” Edmund White remarked on how strange this phrase seemed.  Wasn’t the whole point to simply have as much sex as you could?  Wasn’t sex supposed to free you?  Why on earth would you bother with “knowing your partners?”  Picano certainly chronicles a bye gone age.

So this is a disquieting book.  Picano has sex, and it seems to satisfy.  Presumably he succeeded in “becoming a homosexual” (but doesn’t that phrasing sound a bit quaint in retrospect?).  At least in this first section of the book, he doesn’t succeed in finding love.  What he does gain is a beautiful gold Bulgari watch—which years later will come in handy when Picano finds himself in dire circumstances back in New York.

An interesting read, certainly—but prone to provoking mild indigestion.

Review: "The Most Golden Bulgari" (1 of 2)

“The Most Golden Bulgari” is the first section of Felice Picano’s “memoir in the form of a novel” Men Who Loved me (1989).  The book is itself the second installment of an autobiographical trilogy.

Felice Picano was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of writers who met to discuss gay writing, back in the 1980-1.  Members included Edmund White and Andrew Holleran.

I’m currently reading Men Who Loved Me for the second time.  I find the writing entertaining but a bit on the “light” side.  I’m more naturally drawn to the style of White and Holleran, who seem more introspective and thoughtful.  Their writing seems more sensuous somehow—although Picano can certainly turn a clever phrase.

Picano had earned a literary college degree, then found himself employed in New York City as a social worker.  This was the 1960s.  He saw plenty of “life” in a certain sense—the life of the troubled and the poor in the area around the Spanish Harlem in Manhattan.  Faced with the prospect of a promotion and a successful “career” in social work, he decides instead to go to Europe and actually live—and look for love.  And to “become homosexual.”  What he actually means by this phrase is not clear.  He had dated women, but the relationships had gone nowhere; they weren’t even relationships, really; just casual dating.  He’d then tried men—but that hadn’t gone anywhere either.

Arriving in Rome, he almost immediately encounters a group of expatriate American actors and actresses; through them he meets…his first long-term lover, a Yugoslavian film director named Djanko.  “The Most Golden Bulgari” follows the semi-comic exploits of these people.  It’s a bit confusing keeping the three women straight in my mind—which one is from Boston, which from the Mid-West, etc.  The young actor is more memorable, since more unique:  He speaks a rural slang and comes across as rather inane; but he possesses marvelous musculature and is therefore ideal to play characters like Hercules in sand-and-sandal epics. 

Picano and Djanko fall in love “at first sight.”  Whether it is love or lust is difficult to tell.  It’s clear Picano cares about him; he remains with him a year, after all.  How Djanko feels in return is less certain—he’s always working or worrying about his current and future film projects.  What Djanko does do, though, is shower Picano with presents, including a golden Bulgari watch.  Even though he is filming what seem to be second- or third-rate movies, he’s presented as being fabulously rich; Picano never lacks for adornment.  Perhaps because he’s grown up in Communist Yugoslavia, Djanko is obsessed with gold and insists on presenting Picano with gold watches, gold cigarette cases, gold cuff links…  When Picano can’t decide which color shirt he prefers, Djanko simply buys him one of each color so that he’ll have the color his prefers whenever he finally gets around to choosing.

(To be continued)