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

showers.”
    I moved through the Mineshaft in a kind of trance, like a zombie, or sleepwalker. Most others were in a trance, too. I saw Kevin, Howard’s grip, there soon after we met and he had the same inability to say a word to me that I had to him. It was as if we were all shot up with some anesthetizing drug before we walked in. “Feeling no pain” was an important motivator. Drugs were in the air everyone breathed. I saw my doctor, who had a mostly gay practice on the Upper East Side, splayed on the pool table in the main room with poppers held to his nose and things being done to him. He was the brains behind giving antibiotics to all of us patients to take before going out, as a prophylactic measure against exposure to venereal diseases. Of course, the shortsighted tactic backfired within the petri dish of the Mineshaft as subcommunities became hosts to infections that soon developed resistances to the antibiotics and needed more and more powerful prescriptions. The place obviously had a risky edge. The doorman, a French furniture curator by day, purportedly threw someone down the steps and broke his arm in a rage over a misplaced handkerchief or inappropriate blazer or preppy loafers. I rememberthinking that this was Satanism lite—or “fascinating fascism,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase; something had to give.
    But the two-storey dream box, full of floor hatches and shoeshine stands, torture devices and pillories out of Puritan Salem, also had an extraordinarily dark lustrous glamor, a cosmopolitan dandyism that must have rivaled the Hellfire Club of eighteenth-century London. Comparisons to the vertiginous latter days of the Roman Empire, or to Weimar Berlin, were always being made. I was infatuated with the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and had written a story, “Jailbait,” as homage to an early film of his. J. J. Mitchell presented Fassbinder with a typescript copy at the bar of the Mineshaft. Susan Sontag and some other women were rumored to have snuck in disguised as men to participate in its democratic voyeurism. I was mesmerized with one regular, a charismatic Jersey-seeming young guy always dressed in slick leather with every color handkerchief lined up in orderly fashion in his rear black leather pants pocket, who marched through the place like a martinet. One night a mutual friend, an art dealer, introduced us. He was Robert Mapplethorpe, and we had a polite conversation. A few days later he sent me a postcard with one of his photographs—a large uncut hose of a cock flaccid across skin inked with a pentagram. The message: if I ever needed a photograph for a project, perhaps we might collaborate. I felt a prissy clutch of embarrassment knowing that the proletarian mailman had seen the startling image of the tattooed skin and penis.
    Howard had his own clubs, from the other side of the dotted aesthetic divide. He went to Paradise Garage, a members-only dance club in a converted garage on King Street in the lower West Village. He was very proud of his laminated black-and-white membership card and held on to it for years in the same way that Iheld on to a precious, tattered copy of the Mineshaft “dress code” posting that I had charmed out of someone, maybe the doorman. Paradise Garage was alcohol-free, meaning that it was purely a druggie club. I went once with Howard, and remember a side ramp going up to a dance floor filled with mostly Latin and black kids. The bar was a regular hangout of Keith Haring, who had arrived in town the year before. (I later found out that Keith was the culprit writing “CLONES GO HOME” on the street, and that he had founded FAFH.) Howard’s other favorite was Mudd Club, which opened that fall on White Street below Canal. As it was more of a punk-rock club, I only went there a few times, and only with Howard. A joke on Studio 54, the club had a black-leather, instead of red-velvet, rope strung outside. As at the Mineshaft, only more so, fucking was