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

taking place against the walls, and in the bathrooms, but mostly boy on girl. At the Mineshaft you heard trippy Terry Riley or Brian Eno electronic “head music.” At the Mudd Club you heard David Bowie or Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. Both spots were vehement enemies of 54 and disco.
    Howard and I had the good sense, without discussing the issue, to know that if we wanted to get to know each other we would need to spring free of our routines, erratic as they were. Or maybe we both just wanted to get to the beach. It was August, and New York seemed hotter and more humid then than now. Howard, unlike me, did have an air conditioner, an appliance as gigantic as a washing machine, set in one of his front windows, though he complained that it only cooled three square feet of the loft. Howard was usually the more capable, get-things-done one. Pretty soon he took to describing me as a “luxury item.” For example, as part of his barter with the Bari brothers (who yelled out “Howie” every time theysaw him walking down the Bowery, as if he were some kind of pet or mascot) he was now mostly renting out their apartments to fellow film school students. He rented one particularly shadowy little place to Jim Jarmusch and his girlfriend Sara Driver. Jim had been a poet at Columbia, another Kenneth Koch student, who advanced farther into the future by deciding to be a poetic filmmaker. At NYU, he was a teaching assistant to Nick Ray, the wizened (at least in my memory) director of Rebel Without a Cause. That apartment turned out to be haunted, furnished in heavy wooden pieces left by the haunter or his wife—I forget the details of its horrific backstory.
    So, naturally, Howard was the one to find our scam of a shack on Fire Island. I had been there two summers earlier, to the Pines, which was basically the West Village loaded onto the Long Island Railroad, then transferred to a ferry, then plunked down intact on this beautiful barrier reef island in the Atlantic Ocean. The Pines was filthy with money, young white males, angled beach-wood high-modern homes built to be flimsy, with the kinds of pools David Hockney was painting in southern California, a pervasive smell of coconut suntan lotion, and a loud persistent rumbling disco beat every night. Fantasies ran high. On my previous trip, the summer before—I was writing copy for a L’Oréal hair-care catalog, a job I scored by sleeping with the beach house–owning art director. I’d gone to the early-evening dance party, Tea Dance, where someone dressed as Batman, with a French accent, led by leash a Filipino boy dressed as Robin. The next day in the high sun Robin laid out fluffy beach towels for Batman. Calvin Klein had a one-lane lap pool where exaggeratedly lithe guys did butterfly strokes.
    But that was the Pines. We weren’t going to the Pines. We were going to “Skunk Hollow.” We giggled at the name, and indeed theplace fit the name. But the place also fit us, and our relationship, and allowed a kind of orchid of intimacy—or stinkweed tree of intimacy—to grow and flourish, which the glossier Pines might not have done. Skunk Hollow was seven miles up the beach from the Pines. Howard knew some film school friends who rented a cabin there for the summer but made an early, unexplained, suspicious exit, and we paid them next to nothing to take over. The hitch (there often was one with these schemes of Howard’s) was that Skunk Hollow was condemned, or zoned off-limits for vacation homes, as part of a government dunes-reclamation program. Cabins were still standing but they were meant to be taken down, or bulldozed, or naturally obliterated by the severe winter weather. We were technically illegal squatters. Howard had found the equivalent situation in real estate in a wilderness area of beach that he had gravitated toward on the edge of the East Village. It was also a fantastically beautiful, magically surrealist dream of a hidden spot.
    For days we holed up in the cabin.