Rat Bohemia (17 page)

At any rate, she ended up telling me a lengthy story about David and the source of their fight. At some moment I started to feel that this might be a historically significant anecdote depending on how much more literary success Muriel Kay Starr was going to have.

This is what she told me.

“I first met David Berman in San Francisco in 1987.”

Then she stopped dead in her tracks and ordered a plateful of chicken wings. For the next twenty minutes I had to watch her tearing the meat off those wings with her teeth. She got grease all over her fingers and all over her glass of planter's punch. She got red grease on all the bunched up napkins, pieces of napkin stuck on her fingers, and slivers of meat protruding from between her teeth. Then she ordered another planter's punch and another plate of wings.

“I was having a love affair with a married woman who was teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute and I had traded apartments with a filmmaker living in Cole Valley so that I could be near her. Her husband was back in New York and we spent time together except for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. That's when he would unsuspectingly fly out from New York and stay at her place on Nob Hill, at which time I had to basically get lost.

“A friend of mine, Robert, was having an affair with X, a famous gay writer still living, and they were both out in San Francisco since X was touring with his new novel. I was hanging out with them, having been abandoned by my girl, and we spent a lot of time talking about AIDS. Especially since Robert's previous boyfriend had died of AIDS and he was extremely paranoid about getting infected. I remember at one point when Robert, who was negative, had been fucking X and the condom broke and Robert was hysterical even though he was the penetrator and X was, himself, negative. It was all at a very high pitch. We weren't all used to it yet.

“One night, X, Robert, and I were invited to the home of a very wealthy gay man in a mansion in Pacific Heights. He was the brother or cousin, I believe, of the actress who played the Catwoman on the original
Batman
. Every man at the dinner table owned his own vineyard, and each one had brought a bottle of wine from his own stock. A number of them had AIDS, I remember, and one of them had labeled his wine as a benefit for … I think it was DIFFA—the designers' AIDS group. Anyway, that night X told me about a young man who had recently interviewed him for
Coming-Up
, the San
Francisco gay and lesbian newspaper. And X had been very impressed with this young man and very sad that he had AIDS and was only working on his first manuscript.

“A few nights later we went to a party at the home of Deborah Chasnoff, who would later win an Academy Award for a film about General Electric. And there was this young man we had just been discussing. As soon as X introduced us there was great empathy between us and I felt very close to him. Well, that was David.”

By this time the second plate of wings arrived and I watched her devour them again. The smell of lard was deafening. It brought back the embalming fluid of that afternoon and for one moment, I imagined her tearing off David's flesh from his coffin filled with hot sauce and pulling his gristle out from between her teeth. Dipping his celery fingers in blue cheese dressing.

“So David had this manuscript of short stories that he desperately wanted to have published in his lifetime. I took the manuscript home and saw that there were good things in it, even though it was not developed. I remember spending the rest of the holidays, working out my grief at my abandonment by my lover, by enthusiastically editing it.”

Polyps of grease were floating in the planter's punch. They formed lesions on the ice cubes like someone's bad news MRI.

“Well, the story had a happy ending because the book was published, with a little blurb from me on the back, and it did moderately well. But my greatest joy was that David and I were able to read together at The Kitchen the spring after his book was published. I felt that it was a fitting end to our time together because I expected him to die within the year.”

She leaned back into the chair, wing in hand.

“But he did not die. He did get sicker, but wrote another book, a novel. Again, it showed promise but wasn't fully developed. Again, I read over the manuscript, carefully making editorial suggestions, caring. I remember going to visit him one day at home in New York before that book came out and he could barely walk or swallow. I never expected to see him again. When we talked on the phone some months later, he was terribly upset that his novel was not being reviewed and I quickly called and wrote the
Village Voice
that I desperately wanted to write on this book. I explained by letter twice, and on the phone once, that I wanted the review to come out while David was still alive. About seven more months passed and there was still no answer. Then I saw Stacey, one of the
VLS
editors, on the street and grabbed her, which is a total violation of protocol. She told me that my request was going through the channels and I would just have to wait. Well, the review finally did come out. It was the best review that book got—its only mention outside of the gay press.”

She paused then, waiting for me to say something.

“God, you lead an interesting life,” I said.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

The truth is that the more Muriel Kay Starr talked about this side of David's life, the more I realized I did not know a lot about him. I saw a whiny, kind of wonderful, typically self-obsessed, totally fucked-over gay guy eking out a living in my neighborhood. I saw a lonely, smart guy sitting on a park bench. I saw a loner. Every time I ran into him carrying a bag of groceries, he seemed to be alone.

Muriel, though, was describing this glamorous world of connections and parties, transcontinental affairs, encounters with powerful editors and literary world alliances. Was he like me or was he like her? Was David one of them or one of us?

“And then what happened?”

“Well,” she said, waving away the stack of bones. “Wait one minute, I have to go wash my hands.”

She came wobbling back a few minutes later and ordered a third planter's punch. I ordered one too and it tasted like Hawaiian Punch and vodka.

“David got sicker and sicker, of course. Time passed and I got a job teaching out in SF for one semester while he happened to be there. We decided to share an apartment for two months and it went pretty well. He liked to sit in the living room and listen to Joni Mitchell records. He loved to read, discuss books, and was an incredible gossip. He had incredibly sarcastic things to say about other people. Some days he was too sick to get out of bed. I would come home from work and he would have been watching all the talk shows all afternoon and recording the most offensive ones. At that time there was a whole series of talk shows about people who
supposedly purposely infected others with HIV—these completely infuriated and depressed him. Especially because the shows never mentioned that if everyone would use condoms, these questions would disappear. He would insist that I sit at the edge of his bed and watch his tape compilation of the day's outrages.

“When he finished that novel I did everything I could to help him get a mainstream publisher. I sent it to my own editor and to others, even those I don't have good relationships with. Eventually one of them bought it for two or three thousand dollars. But at the end of our time together I sensed an increasing bitterness on David's part. It wasn't only about his disease and the way his family was treating him. It was something more. Something about the fact that I would live.”

I remembered the movies and realized I had twenty minutes to get out of there. I tried easing her to the end of her story and signaled to the waiter for the check.

“When I got back to New York we talked on the phone about once a week. Then he came back too and things seemed to be fine until one day he called and said that he had an in with a good magazine, and if he could do an interview with me he would get a regular gig. Of course I agreed. Well, you can imagine how devastated I was to discover that the interview was a hatchet job on my personality. All the things he hated about me that he never said to my face. And there was this profound resentment that a woman could occupy some public space as a respected thinker or intellectual—space that he did not occupy and would never occupy because he was dying. I felt terrible that he violated me so personally and I was disappointed that he proved to be such a jerk about women in the end.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“After the fall he did all the things that weak people do. After attacking me he wanted me to say that it was okay. He called and called and called, leaving millions of messages. And I really had to ask myself if I should overlook this incident because he was dying. For three months I thought about this every day. Finally, I decided that I could not ignore the violation of our relationship. If he was the only dying person in my life, maybe I could be a martyr to his rage—both the justified rage and the unjustified rage. But I am surrounded by dying people and will be until the day that I am one of them and I cannot spend the rest of my life in fake relations. Besides, the anger of men at smarter women is my largest waste of time. But I did write him a letter explaining my decision. This, at least, gave him one last chance to come through.”

“Did you ever see him again? ”

“No,” she said. “But about a month ago I got a letter from his friend Manuel, you know—that Cuban guy—I think he's a poet or something. He had taken my letter and mailed it back to me. Over my writing he had scrawled
you are despicable
. I just assumed that he was taking his rage out on me too. Women are convenient targets for that. Maybe it helped him feel better. And now David is dead. Today was his funeral.”

She finished and the check came. We both sat there looking at the piece of paper. I remembered when David showed me an article from
The New Yorker
about the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The author made this really good point about how suicides are always right and those left behind are always wrong.

“But, wait a minute,” I said. “Muriel, that's not the only reason
that David was mad at you. You're leaving out some very important information.”

“Like what? ” She seemed exhausted.

“He was mad at you for writing closeted novels. For not even being out in your author bio on the back of the book.”

This vocabulary was coming out of my mouth. I was channeling this dead guy and had no proof to back up my argument.

“I am so out. It says there that I've written for
Genre
magazine.”

“But what straight person is going to have ever heard of
Genre
magazine? ”

“Don't tell me what to do,” she said, throwing down a twenty-dollar bill. “David was just jealous. Have you even read my books?”

“I skimmed one.”

“David was jealous. You read my book before you complain. It's not about that. My books are not about homosexuality. They're about family. I wasn't even that famous yet and he was terribly terribly jealous.”

By the time I got to the movie theater, I just wanted something to kiss. And, perfect timing—there she was. I spotted her out of the corner of my eye and she spotted me, but she acted like she didn't notice me notice her appreciatively, her light sundress.

I also noticed that she was with two fags and an old friend on a Friday night, so no romance in this girl's life. Nothing important enough for Friday night, anyways.

“Peace for Cuba,” I said, flashing a victory sign and she put her hand firmly on the back of my neck like she was going to strangle me, her tiny little kitten. Then she kissed me warmly on the mouth and walked off with her pals. I started to follow, but suddenly there was a ruckus behind us and everyone turned around to watch. It was the right-wing gay Cubans making their appearance with leaflets against the films they'd all just bought tickets to see.

Lourdes and her friends sat in one place and I decided to go to the other side since it would be too forward to act that quick. I noticed Manuel, alone of course, looking totally depressed. I didn't want to sit with him either, so I crawled silently down the aisle behind him without even saying hello.

The films were in Spanish, no English subtitles. I hardly knew anyone there, except an Argentinean Communist who took the seat next to me and immediately started complaining in Spanish about the Cubans.

“They're crazy,” he said.

The first short started, but from the beginning the right-wingers couldn't take it. They were mad at anyone who even lived in Cuba. Every time some gay person on the screen had a problem, they clapped. Their Cuba was not allowed even one blade of green grass.

Even though the films were made at an elite Havana film school by elite non-Cuban Latin students, they were all filled with pain. The first three had the same story. A man goes cruising in:

He finds a trick and services him, no reciprocity. Then suddenly they get caught and his lover turns around:

In one film the lover simply betrayed him without beating him up. It was that place between Stalin and a man's naked body.

Gay movies show where gay people live. I guess gay Cuban men live in public toilets with one-way blow jobs and a lot of stabs in the back, or do they live in those beautiful sanitoriums that the official government AIDS documentary liked to show? The one with fresh orange juice on the table? The whole audience laughed out loud at that one, except for the Anglo lefties who'd gone over with the Venceremos Brigade.