Another Little Piece of My Heart (21 page)

In this climate of radical status flux, Clay Felker had an audacious idea. He wanted to send me to Saigon. “The Pop War!” he proclaimed, with a stop-the-presses look in his eye. As usual, he was right about the story. Felker had a real gift for matching writers with subjects, and going to Vietnam would have been a great career move for me. But there was no way that the experience would be as benign as his last bizarre assignment, which involved John Wayne. I pictured myself threading through the night town of Saigon, entering whorehouses and interviewing men my age who were traumatized by a war that I, and many of them, abhorred. Most of these guys were working-class. How could I move among them with my ponytail pulled up under a helmet? Wouldn’t it be clear that I was exempt from the draft? And how had I carried that off? A set of providentially fallen arches? No. I’d used something more effective—and unmentionable. I had “queered out.”

That’s what it was called in the project, and it was worse than even admitting that you had a tiny dick. But when my student deferment
expired and I was summoned by the draft board, I considered all my options. I’d gotten a shrink to write a letter. When I saw the diagnosis—“schizoid tendencies”—I knew it wouldn’t fly. Schizoids could make very efficient killing machines. No way was I going to fight in this war. I was prepared to leave the country if I had to, and I’d already lined up a job at the
Toronto Star
. But I didn’t want to live in a sensible place like Canada. There was only one other recourse. I checked the box that said “homosexual feelings”—some phrase like that. I girded myself for the moment when the doctor saw it. Surely a siren would go off and I would end up standing naked while a circle of men spat at me. But I did have those … feelings, which is what I told the white-coated man who placed me behind a screen and asked a few questions in an even tone. Had I had sex with a man? Yes. (Back in the Bronx, with that boy who picked me up in his Pontiac with the Madonna on the dashboard.) Had I enjoyed it?
Joy
wasn’t the right word to describe my confused feelings, but I nodded yes, and that was that. I would never have to share the shameful secret if I didn’t care to. But it made going to Vietnam as a reporter seem like the height of hypocrisy. Of all the reasons why I was in a privileged position, toting a notebook rather than a gun, my uncertain sexuality seemed like the most unconscionable. It felt like a betrayal of the kids I’d grown up with. So I turned the assignment down, leaving the story of the “pop war” to someone more securely straight.

I suppose I should say something conclusive about my relationship to gay culture in the mid-sixties, but I didn’t have one. I had a friendship with a gay man, my roommate John, and an ample yearning toward certain guys, but no sexual connections with them. Even at the
Voice
, which had hired homosexuals during the fifties, when such a thing was unheard of in the media, the queers kept a low profile. As for the music scene, forget it. For all its florid androgyny, rock was a very macho milieu, and even critics I knew to be bisexual didn’t send those signals in their writing—nor did I. It wasn’t just discretion or cowardice; I honestly didn’t feel gay. But there was one exception to my heteronormativity. I dug drag queens.

I had met Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling at the Factory. It was one of the first media-savvy scenes where camping was a truly public act, and where sexual personae of all sorts were part of the mix. I guess most transgender kids today would regard the sense of incipient failure that Holly and Candy displayed as the essence of oppression. In the films
Warhol made with them, they could never get the man of their dreams—usually Joe Dallesandro, the outer-boroughs hustler as superstar—and they seemed always a shriek away from falling apart. This aura of incipient breakdown is why they were so fascinating to me. I don’t think it had much to do with my uncertain sexuality. It was more like a metaphor for my class anxieties, my inability to master the codes that marked someone as affluent, or even middle-class. I was much more sensitive about my Bronxitude than I was about anything else, and in order to hide my roots I wore a costume so flamboyantly hippie-dippy that it was beyond class. In effect, I was a drag queen in rock gear.

If I’d had the need to integrate my sexuality into the rest of my life, I might have come out as whatever I was. But I didn’t feel incomplete or inauthentic with women, and the cost would have been considerable in 1967, not just for a rock critic. Gay writers were expected to be bitchy, fragile, or geniuses, and I was none of those things. Instead, I went with the orthodoxy of the time and told myself that everyone was basically bisexual. It was hip to be androgynous, and I could convince myself that the fantasy I savored, of Mick Jagger in net stockings and pumps, was some sort of tribute to British style. In California I’d heard musicians talk about a “gay-off” as a kind of adventure in ecotourism; it had no implications for one’s identity. There were queers all around me, but they faded into the hippie parade. Whatever happened in gay bars—which were all run by the mafia in New York—decorousness was the dominant public code, especially among the homosexual elite.

Several important gay men took an interest in me in the sixties, but I didn’t respond to their overtures. It wasn’t just homosexual panic. I saw all gay men in Manhattan as rich, and I was afraid of rich people. I remember an invitation to the home of Henry Geldzahler, a renowned museum curator and a leading proponent of Pop Art. He was openly gay, an exceptional stance at the time. Over the course of a lengthy conversation I could feel him sizing me up. Perhaps he saw a certain potential in me, or maybe he just liked my type. I couldn’t tell, but it freaked me out, and I shrank from his gaze. I was sure someone like Geldzahler wanted only one thing: to be fucked dumb by me. I had the feeling that I was being slotted into the role of working-class stud, the mold I thought gay culture assigned to guys from housing projects. But that wasn’t me. Nor did I fit the other gay stereotype, that of the suave sophisticate. I was neither a butch vulgarian nor a fey aesthete. I
was just an uncertain commoner, and that meant there would be no future for me in gay life, even if I’d wanted to be part of it.

After this incident I confided in John. We weren’t living together, but we were still close friends, and he had nearly as great a stake in my heterosexuality as I did. (He wasn’t the only gay man with whom I would play the role of an accepting straight friend.) John said it was all about training. I could deal with the problem of class by mastering the codes of conduct in my new milieu—after all, he was the son of a ward heeler, and now he was messing with upscale guys. “Sure,” I told him. “You’re fucking them.” My anxiety went much deeper than my proletarian roots, but he convinced me that all I needed was a crash course in etiquette. I would have to learn verbs like
to dine
and
to summer
—and, puh-
leaz
, he groaned, say Long Island, not Lung-island.

And so I set out to conquer my fear of the haves. My first stop was a soirée at the home of New York’s senior senator, the very honorable Jacob Javits. I wasn’t just there for basic training. I knew it would give my father
nachas
(earned pleasure of the sort you get from a successful child) to know that I was being invited to meet the most powerful Jew in American politics. Every year my father sent Javits a Hanukkah card, on the chance that the senator would see this greeting from a fellow Yid and intervene to wrest a promotion at the post office. Needless to say, he never got a reply. But maybe I could have a word with Javits on his behalf, he said bashfully. I promised I would, but I knew such things weren’t done—my father understood even less than I did about how to behave in tony circles. I stood in the corner of the senator’s elegant parlor as soigné people sauntered by. Mrs. Marion Javits, who was very much the socialite, approached me. I looked into her perfectly shaped eyes and explained in some detail who I was, thinking there must be fifty thousand Goldsteins in the New York phone book. “Oh,” she said, “I
know
who you are.” Then she floated off. I realized that journalists who appeared at salons were expected to be seen but not heard. I had a lot to learn.

Fortunately for me, the rules were changing fast. In a smug and stable time, there’s a logic to what passes for couth, just as there is for wisdom. But in a Lewis Carroll wonderland all you can trust is your reactions, and journalism is an art of the first impression. Immediacy is its major virtue, and this authority of the quick take was a major reason why serious writers attempted reportage. Though I still felt unworthy in
their midst, the way I had around Italian guys in the project, now I had a secret weapon. The cool kids of Manhattan wanted a guide to the new hip action. This was a service I could provide, and they were seeking me out. Even Susan Sontag wanted to meet me. Me, Little Richie from the projects.

Sontag was one of the few people over the age of thirty whom I trusted. She understood the power of pop culture, and she was far more knowing than other intellectuals about things like pornography and camp. Her privileging of the sensual surface over interpretation, and her occasional nods to rock, made a major impression on me. It was true, as Sontag wrote, that a song by the Supremes was as complex as a piece by Bach, at least when it came to the canon that Motown artists drew from. Just the fact that pop music
had
a canon was an idea I never thought I’d see articulated by a prestigious critic. I was more in awe of her than I’d been of even Norman Mailer. And there was no danger that she would want to box me.

Imagine how I felt when she appeared, out of the West Side ether, at a café near Lincoln Center. She flashed the wry but engagé look she showed in photos, and soon we were chatting away. I wish I could recall that conversation, but my mind draws a blank, a sign that I was very nervous. The only thing I remember—quite clearly—was what she said about my work. She told me that her young son, now the writer David Rieff, had hipped her to my column. And then she said, twinkling a bit, that I was “a teenage Marcel Proust.”

I didn’t know it then, but backhanded compliments were typical of Sontag’s personal style. She was constantly hustled for endorsements, which she reserved for work that met her rigorous standards. European authors obscure to me—I didn’t know there
were
poets in Romania—won her loyalty, but she was wary of supporting writing she didn’t truly believe in, even by her friends. So she found a way to compose a blurb that was an art form in itself. I remember one such comment about a novel by a friend of mine, and hers. “A revolutionary down,” Sontag wrote, “but do we deserve an up?” At the time when we met, I had no feeling for the drollery that passed for hedging your bets in Manhattan. I’d read enough Proust to know that I was no teenage version of him. All I could do was wince at that pat on the back. As a cartographer of the
new culture, Sontag was supposed to know better than to call a novice a genius. Another hero had turned out to have feet of irony.

But why did she want to meet me? I think it had to do with something I didn’t believe I had—a sensibility. Rock wasn’t really her thing. She didn’t seem desperate to unearth the mysteries of the Beatles. The word
heavy
was not in her vocabulary. But she couldn’t be the premier critic of now-culture without understanding rock, and that wasn’t as easy as, say, grasping the meaning of films, since there was a whole body of work about what the French had convinced us to call
cinema
. But once she confronted pop music in all its vulgar energy, she was lost in a world without her finely honed standards, and for a critic that’s a pretty scary place. I was someone who lived and breathed pop. I seethed to its beat. This was probably what made me interesting to her.

Fortunately I never needed a favor from Sontag, except for the time I asked her for a letter of introduction so I could report from revolutionary Cuba. She wasn’t keen on it, and the way she said so was to point out that the money the Castro government would spend on me could be better dispensed to the poor. Even I got the drift of that brush-off. But we remained in touch over the years, and I did my best to provide experiences that I sensed she needed. In 1975, on her first night out after her initial surgery for breast cancer, I took her to a place called the Loft, the most exciting downtown disco, the kind of utopian space where all the races and sexualities shook their booties. When things got going at the Loft, the mass swaying in half darkness felt like a subway train when the lights go out. Sontag loved it, and I loved showing her a scene she’d never encountered. I suppose we were friends, but I was always aware of the gap between us, and so was she. The last time I saw her was in the early eighties, at a luncheon held by the humanities institute at New York University. It was in financial trouble, and I’d been asked by its founder, Richard Sennett, to publicize its plight. It wouldn’t be easy to turn that situation into a story, but I was willing to try. At some point Sontag rose from the table. Staring at me, she said, “To think that we need Richard Goldstein in order to raise money!” It felt like a pie in the face—proof that I was nothing more than a necessity. She may have been a champion of humanism, but she was incapable of realizing how cruel her bons mots could be.

Still, Sontag was the finest cultural interpreter of her era, and I’ve always been a fan. I dip into her work the way I listen to certain albums
over and over. She had the courage to revise her thinking, which is a more remarkable trait than it should be in a critic. They may be momentarily correct, but they are never permanently right, certainly not in a time of rapid change; yet they are rarely willing to reexamine their most closely held opinions. Sontag was one of the few critics who didn’t rest in peace. She once called America “the cancer of Western civilization,” but she went on to write a brilliant critique of metaphorical thinking about illness. She made her name by privileging sensuality over morality, but in her later work she wrestled with the impact of unmooring aesthetic experience from ethical thinking. “By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, art changes morals,” she wrote in her best book,
On Photography.
“In the long run it works out not as a liberation but as a subtraction from the self; a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life.” As usual her radar was acute.