Dorian (13 page)

—You better check it out, Basil, said Lady Di.

He undid bolts and slid the door open with three chains on it. Outside there was a strip of leather cowboy boot, blue denim, white cotton and blond hair. A strip of Dorian.

—Who is it, honey? called Rhea.

—It’s… it’s…

—A friend, Dorian mouthed.

—A friend.

—Now Basil, said Désirée, you know you don’t have no friends no more besides us three queen bees.

—No really, it is a friend – a guy from London.

—Oh ferchrissakes, Rhea bawled, let the guy in, let’s get a look at him.

‘And in came Dorian, right over the threshold and bounding into the false bosom of the family. The great thing about Dorian is that he can always assume this air of puppyish good nature. He also looked the same age as a puppy, which the Avenue B trio thought was just
too
peachy. He stepped over their trash as if it wasn’t there. I guess it was hanging round with you, Henry, that gave him the idea of incorporating camp courtliness into his act; well, it went down a scream with the she-males, the hand-kissing and the “Charmed to meet you, ladies”.

‘Even so, they were suspicious – God bless them – they knew what I’d been through. They knew that no one who’d been as down as me had any friends left worth the name. Still, they ran with Dorian’s formal act and questioned him as if he were a suitor and they three maiden aunts guarding my virtue. Eventually they had to go, but they made me promise to be back the next day. I wasn’t. Nor the one after.

‘I was powerless to resist Dorian, Henry, I always have been, and anyway, I didn’t want to resist him – I simply wanted him again. As long as I didn’t go back on the fucking gear I thought everything would be OK; it was that – as far as I saw it – that was the problem. Not Dorian. So, that day in the summer of ’82, he picked me up, he dusted me down and he took me shopping.

‘We zoomed uptown, leaping from cab to cab, in and out of stores. It was like a parody of every naïve-hick-comes-to-New York movie you’ve ever seen, Henry. Dorian wanted to take Manhattan by storm; I was to provide his entrée, and for that I needed clothes and grooming, I needed what Dorian freely gave. I did feel a genuine gratitude to him. I still do, despite everything that came afterwards. He plucked me from Avenue Β and set me down fifty blocks north in the Palm Court of the Waldorf Astoria. You know how good that kind of transition can feel, Henry, don’t you?’

Indeed.

In the Palm Court of the Waldorf Astoria, a string quartet whittled away at the afternoon, paring off shavings of time. At round, glass-topped tables women with big hair and egregiously padded shoulders were sipping tea or martinis. The mismatched duo – one a gilded youth, the other a sweaty wreck – were ushered by a white-jacketed waiter into the presence of a little old man in a tiny contemporary suit. The collar points of his seersucker jacket rose almost to his pixie ears, and his lined pinhead was liver-spotted. He wore an obvious toupee. It was the Ferret. But Baz wasn’t remotely surprised to see him; he merely acknowledged the way the titchy world spun thus:

—Fergus.

—Ah, Baz, my young friend here has managed to locate you – we had only the most
oriental
of whispers as to where you might be. Bob had told Doug, Doug had vouchsafed it to Steve, Steve passed it on to Captain America, and so on, and so forth… so fatiguing. The Ferret sniffed noisily and dabbed at his dribbling nose with a square foot of silk.

—He was way downtown, Dorian put in, on the Lower East Side. He’s become a kind of ladies’ maid, Fergus!

—Confirm, Baz?

—It’s true enough. These three drag queens took me in and looked after me – they’ve helped me kick the smack.

—Oh jolly good, such a
bore
, smack. Or rather, that kind of it.

The waiter reappeared and asked Dorian and Baz if they’d like anything. Dorian confined himself to a glass of Badoit, but Baz began as shamelessly as he intended to go on, requesting a quantity of sandwiches that amounted to a meal.

—In New York for any special reason, Fergus? Baz asked, when the waiter had clicked off across the tiles.

—No, no, usual shopping expedition. It may be hot at this time of year, but it’s quiet. Naturally I shall take Dorian out to the Hamptons to meet a few people, but I shan’t be able to truly launch him until the season begins.

—So where do I fit into this picture?

—Well, his dear parents having abandoned him so woefully in this regard, I shall have to take care of his uptown début, but we rather felt that in the meantime you could facilitate his entry into the downtown milieu.

—I don’t know, Fergus, I’ve got to stay clean, and the gay scene here – well, it’s saturated with drugs and a hell of a lot rougher than it is in London. The people I know play hard, and Dorian’s too tempting a plaything.

The Ferret first sniffed at this, then blew into his silk hanky. He certainly found what Baz said interesting; it was just that the Schubert was perfectly slumberous and the ambience absolutely torpid and he couldn’t quite forbear from allowing his head to nod towards the damask. Still, he did manage to make a few remarks on the way down… My dear Baz, I’m under no illusions as to how
louche
things can be in New York.

—There’s some kind of new disease around; it’s killing gay men on the west coast, and I’ve heard of a few cases here in NYC as well.

—
Gay
– must you employ the term quite so widely? It’s a ludicrous sobriquet, I
so
prefer ‘queer’… I’m well acquainted with this new malaise… They say it’s a function of too many poppers… or some such
déclassé
drug-taking. Not the sort of thing we expect from dear Dorian… Anyway, Baz, you’ll be around to look after him,
won’t
you m’dear…? Too kind… I’ll be here for a couple of weeks… You’ll keep me posted…

And Baz and Dorian strained for a few seconds to hear the pinhead drop, which it did, with an audible ‘clank’ on to the glass table. As if this were a prearranged signal, one of the Ferret’s heavyweight boyfriends materialised, pushing a wheelchair. He was a swarthy Mexican; an old knife scar across his Hispanic cheek had let out a little of the Amerindian stuffing. He gave the duo a cursory nod, manhandled the Ferret into the wheelchair, and pushed him away between the palms. The egregiously-shouldered women sent the little parcel of a man pitying looks as he passed by.

—Jesus, said Baz once they were gone, that was a quick flake-out even by his standards.

—Well, he can’t get the speed he likes here for some reason, so he’s doing cocaine instead. Pablo handles giving it to him, and even here at the Waldorf they take a rather a dim view of their patrons’ engaging in such practices in the public areas.

The waiter returned with a silver stand laden with ditsy eatables; he poured them tea, distributed plates and retired.

—So, how about it? Dorian said, rubbing his hands together with childish glee.

—How –
nyum-nyum
– about what? Basil was stuffing the sandwiches in three at a time, poor Gulliver at the Lilliputian court.

—How about introducing me to Warhol and Burroughs and that photographer guy? Y’know, all the people you told me you hung out with here? I’ve got the money, I’ll even set you up in your own studio again – we can create a scene together.

—Oh… well… I s’pose we can give it a try.

A pathetic rejoinder: ‘I s’pose we can give it a try.’ Difficult to conceive of this as the beginning of one of the great avant-garde scenes: ‘I s’pose we can give it a try.’ Hard to imagine that this inauspicious beginning (‘I s’pose we can give it a try’) will none the less become a rallying cry for disaffected youth from all over the eastern seaboard and then the wider world; or that this downbeat encounter will, in time, come to be deemed as significant as the first meeting between Rimbaud and Verlaine. Hard – because it won’t. By the early 1980s the avant-garde was busy being franchised and sold off to a series of designer labels and purpose-designed emporia. Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci. Only somebody as staggeringly ill-informed as Dorian Gray could have imagined that there was still a ‘scene’ to be created in Manhattan.

Oh no, what happened to flagrant queers and uppity blacks and defiant junkies in America was that they got absorbed, then packaged and retailed like everybody and everything else. In America in the 1980s the counter-culture became the over-the-counter culture with sickening alacrity, and Andy Warhol – poor Basil Hallward’s name-dropping nemesis – was the acned acme of it all. When the domestic market was brand-saturated they re-exported it all back to Europe, just in case there were any little pockets of resistance that needed mopping up.

A ‘scene’. Laughable. Impossible to imagine Baz Hallward, with his mouldering collar-length hair and mildewed pate, strutting his stuff on the dance floor at Studio 54. No, it was too late for those lofty heights; Baz only just about had the cachet to infiltrate his beautiful protégé into the loft of Bobby Mapplethorpe, who, when all was said and done, would say anything and do anyone.

‘Naturally,’ Baz grabbed his tale back and brought it twisting into the cubicle, ‘Bobby wanted to photograph Dorian in poetic positions. Dorian erect, Dorian among the nightingales, Dorian penetrated by black cocks and arms, while his face betrayed nothing save wry amusement. But while he made an impression, securing invitations to soirées of artists and intellectuals, he was quite as taken… by being taken. He seemed, Henry, to positively enjoin the people he met to handle him without care, to fold him, to spin-dry him… it’s a wonder, considering the way he put himself about, that he wasn’t mutilated.

‘To begin with I’d go out with him at night, down to the Mineshaft on 12th Street. It was strange the way he not only adopted the typical clone costume of biker jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans, with greased-back hair under a peaked cap, he even made it his own. All the clones I’ve seen since then – even the ones I saw walking through Soho on my way here – seem to me to be clones of Dorian. The streets of downtown New York were fucking rough, full of homeless guys, and crack was beginning to cut its swathe through the city. On 12th there’d be empty coke vials crunching under our boots. It was the meat-packing district, so the air smelt of blood and the paving stones were sticky with it and worse. I tried to warn him…’

‘I can imagine…’ Wotton drawled from the bed.

‘Imagine? Imagine what – the Mineshaft?’

‘No, not
that
, I never went there’ – he groped for another cigarette – ‘but I bet I could write your dialogue so that it had greater authenticity than when you actually spoke it in Manhattan.’

‘Don’t they ever object to your smoking in here?’

‘They object to just about
everything
I do in here, Baz. It’s peculiar how terminal illness is so constrained; it explains what martyrs mean when they describe death as a “liberation”, hmm? Pass me that ashtray and I’ll get on with my imagining. You tell it how it was, Baz – I’ll listen to how it should’ve been.’

The two men stood outside the Mineshaft, feeling the heavy heart of the city beat in the darkness. Listen, Dorian, Baz admonished him, you can play catch-as-catch-can in the bar, but even if you pair off, downstairs and in the back anything can happen, it’s a fucking meat rack in there – I can’t keep up with you… I won’t –

—And I don’t want you to, Baz. I’m a big enough boy – you know that – and I can look after myself.

—You can’t, Dorian; this isn’t Bobby’s playpen, this isn’t a controllable situation at all –

—Shut up!

—What?

—Shut the fuck up! Shut up! You don’t understand anything, Baz, you don’t
know
anything. I can do what I please – I can do what I bloody well please. I’m inviolate, Baz – I’m fucking immortal! And Dorian began to laugh wildly, before grabbing Baz by his jacket and dragging him into Hades – or at any rate some realisation of it art-directed by Hieronymus Bosch but cast by Kenneth Anger.

At the top of a short flight of stairs stood a grim apparition, a leather queen so withered and ravaged he might have been Old Father Rim, the primordial sodomite. He was vetting the queue, beckoning some in, while rejecting others who had failed to observe the dress code with the petulant squeal, You can’t come in! Disco drag! Disco drag!

Dorian and Baz passed muster and entered the main room. It was gloomy, and through its slimy confines gusted the hysterical, chemical stench of amyl nitrate. In one corner a makeshift bar had been knocked together out of plastic crates and wooden boxes; behind it stood a shaven-headed giant serving liquor and beer. In another corner a crude canvas sling swung back and forth, its bare-assed occupant yelping as he was buggered by a fat trucker type. The clientele – to a man – were mustachioed leather queens, pumped up in every way. The only sound was a disturbing susurration; there was no music – and besides, the bar-room had no dance floor, only space for a freeform ruck. The beetle men in their leather carapaces grabbed at each other’s shoulders; they tossed back shot glasses of vodka and bourbon, while wheeling around in an aggressive parody of sociability, closer to a football scrum than any other interaction. There was the reek of sweat and the creak of leather, there was a drunken intensity of leering, and a veritable spumescence of testosterone hovered over the whole scene, as shaven heads clashed and the acrid clouds of cigarette smoke were pierced by spotlights.