Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s Read Online Free PDF Page A

ourselves as more available than we probably were. Frank and I had never officially discussed closure. Howard was still obsessed with Rick. But things moved fast in those days. So we just rearranged.
    The next month is a blur. We both had previous lives continuing. Most of Howard’s was still taking place out of my view. We were a split screen. But weirdly significant shifts happened in both our lives at just that time, on that cusp. I had been feeling anxious about writing stories rather than poems on my clunky little typewriter. Then I hit on writing stories in the present tense in movie-script format, which became my style for the next decade. Was it the influence of having met a filmmaker? Another plot point: Walking down lower Seventh Avenue near my apartment one afternoon I was caught up to by a cheerful Paul Rackley, who said he was something called a “booker” for a modeling agency, Elite. He said I should try it and handed me his card. That card began to itch and buzz, like a fluorescent fly, in a corner of my brain. On Howard’s side, I remember having brunch with him and James Grauerholz—a tall, blond, Nordic midwesterner, Howard’s age, who was William Burroughs’s assistant and intimate—in a greasy spoon on Prince or Spring Street. James had arranged for Howard to shoot William for his student film short, and the talk now wasof going big with the project and Howard making a full-fledged documentary. So we were both expanding.
    But that insight is hindsight. We did meet and we did make some right turns. But it was still the Roaring Seventies and mostly, at least for several weeks, I lived, by virtue of inertia, or habit, the life I had been living, not aware of any pattern-interrupt. That life wasn’t defined by work or school but by wandering the streets, beginning in late afternoon, and often going into the late night, early morning. A marker along the way, a signpost showing where things were heading, appearing sometime mid-decade, had been the Toilet, on West Fourteenth Street. You rode a dicey freight elevator up from the street. Half the club was borrowed from the recent past: a disco dance floor where poppers were sniffed, tambourines banged on butts, while shouting and gyrating emphatically to Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” The other half was a first glimpse of the near future: a transgressive line of dirty-theme toilets (on message with Camille O’Grady’s song) and sex-scene raunchy orgies that you could either watch or take part in.
    The logic set in motion by the Toilet actually did arrive at a bottom line, a finding of limits, like a crash test, at what I definitely thought of as my bar that summer of 1978, the Mineshaft, at the corner of Washington Street and Little West Twelfth. I believe I was there on its first night, or one of its first nights, in the fall of 1976. On my way nowhere special, I saw two shadows dart into a door I didn’t know, probably on my way to the Toilet, which was practically around the corner. It was early, say ten p.m. I followed them, and found myself in a single room of what became a downstairs den of the full-blown club, with just a few other shadows drinking silver cans of beer. When I returned a week or so later, an adjacent doornow led to stairs, and a dress code was in effect, posted, with a guard in place to enforce: no colognes, no “designer sweaters,” no “rugby styled shirts or disco drag.” If you wore any offending clothing you had to strip it off at the “coat check” and put it in a plastic bag to be checked. Some guys in proscribed khakis or dress pants stripped in the glare at the door and walked about in briefs. Sneakers were forbidden too, and some walked barefoot on the iffy floors. “Jock straps” were approved, “& sweat.” Seemingly every week a new vanishing point was introduced: a sling where fist fuckers fisted; a scaffold for whipping willing victims; a bathtub for those desiring “golden