Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series

  I met Hibiscus once (on some North Beach street?), with Link and Scrumbley, who introduced me: a hefty, blond, bearded St Sebastian in his mid-twenties, he wore a blue robe, a gold collar, and half a dozen daisies in his hair. His voice, when he spoke, was just a little higher than I expected it to be.

  But by the time I’d decided that Hibiscus, one of the originary masterminds behind the group, was a true theatrical genius, he had abandoned the Cockettes as too commercial and, frankly, no longer fun.

  I came back to New York and moved into the Albert Hotel on West Tenth Street. A year or so later, so did the Cockettes—taking over most of the eighth floor, so that now the whole hotel, always colorful, for years a haven for rock groups, ragamuffins, and the generally outrageous, stumbled up new crags of chaos, with invasions of Hell’s Angels and admiring cross-dressers from several states—Divine’s and Holly Woodlawn’s visits were the talk of a month—and student leaders of Gay Liberation university groups from Jersey trooping through all day. I came down from my tenth floor room to visit Link (now playing Madame Gin Sling in ‘Pearls over Shanghai’) in their suite a few times, said hello to Scrumbley, took Link and his visiting brother out to dinner at the Cedar Tavern across University Place from the hotel.

  Over Rose Marie’s Hand Laundry within the high walls of the Albert (where Abraham Lincoln had slept the night before he delivered his Cooper Union Address), again and again I found myself sharing the elevator with one and another six-foot-two, football shouldered, teak-black prostitutes in miniskirts, with mouths red as a Christmas ornament, some of whom, an operation or so ago, had been men; and some of who had not. During that period I lost what till then I’d often suspected was genetically ineradicable in the human brain (after all, it might have been a species survival factor…): I stopped wondering what the sex of the person standing next to me had once been. Saturday and Sunday mornings—after Friday and Saturday nights—the same elevator’s floor would be awash in urine, on which floated handfuls of glitter. And once, on the elevator wall, someone wrote in lipstick:

  For Good HEAD

  Do NOT call Patti:

  515-4136

  I Am TIRED!

  The feel in the theatrical suite was colorful but, usually (like Patti), tired after the energy output of their performances.

  For nightly, over at the old Anderson Theater on Second Avenue, in a series of spectacularly uneven shows, the Cockettes galvanized all in the city who could be galvanized. (I must have seen them four times and dragged by how many friends…?) The Voice started by panning them and returned, a week later, for a measured rave.

  Yes, it was a strenuous, aleatory art that required an education.

  But for years, deep among my inner organs, I was certain you couldn’t really know what art was unless you’d seen frail, tone-deaf Johnny, the eponymous hero of ‘Babes,’ with his blond beard, green eye-shadow, and silver lame gown, belt out ‘Lullaby of Broadway one and a quarter tones off-key and an inconstant beat and a half ahead of, or behind, the accompaniment, while the audience cheered and stomped and applauded, till, crying real tears, he would call out, ‘Oh, I didn’t know it was going to be like this! Thank you! Thank you, New York. Thank you all!’ blowing kisses and throwing glitter at the front rows, while the rest of the cast pell-melled from the wings for a thunderous finale: ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,’ inspired, no doubt, by the closing of Part One of Camp Concentration—certainly through Link (writer of a good bit of the material), always a great Disch enthusiast.

  The Jewel Box Review—while it had its own magic—was never like this!

  It was an aesthetic experience that gave the illusion, at least for a night, of being all form, yet devoid of content—specifically all the forms of seduction, while wholly and refreshingly empty of seduction’s matter, i.e., those moments or minutes of aesthetic production that manage to maintain, through practiced skill or artless intensity, the illusion that form and content are, indeed, one.

  Content, of course, must have some form. And form, of course, creates its content/commentary. This is why their chimeras have chased each other through moment after moment of history, the intense perception of one or the other producing the overwhelming effect: Art.

  But by now, no longer with them, Hibiscus was starting another, equally innovative, group here in New York, The Angels of Light.

  If Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are heirs to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstweik, with its high seriousness and darkened auditoria, then Hibiscus and his communal theaters represent all that stood against the Wagnerian—all that was truly Dionysiac in the modern that leads to the postmodern. (There were a couple of early San Francisco performances where the houselights never did go down—presumably because no one was sure how to work them. But Hibiscus’s backstage, ‘Go on, anyway. Now!’ transformed that from a technical disaster into a field of light where art could be observed the more carefully.) With Charles Ludlum before him and Ethyl Eichelberger after, certainly he was not alone. But then, community is what that kind of classical self-assurance and dispassion is always about, anyway. We all have our personal pantheons—there are no canons anymore. Well, along with Maria Irene Fomes and Judith Malina, Hibiscus was a resident director in the Great Delany Utopia Ltd Theater of the Mind.

  Two years ago, the death from AIDS of the man whose hand I shook once on a San Francisco street—George Harris, Jr./Hibiscus—was reported in the Village Voice. Indeed, till that particular article, all I’d read of was KS, the ‘gay cancer,’ and it was only with the report of Harris’s death that I saw for the first time mention of the more general problem of opportunistic infections (Harris died of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia) and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome of which they all were revealed to be a part.

  8.3 ‘…said that the Liberator had almost reached—’

  Nari heard him stop and felt the clay wall’s evening chill under her palm. She looked from the black window to her fingers on the wall in dim red. ‘Zadyuk…?’ She glanced back.’ Are we going to go?’

  He sat on the edge of the bed frame, leaning on his knees, fists hung between. ‘You don’t mean the Carnival, do you?’

  ‘You’ve heard them talking.’ She turned from the wall. ‘You have heard them, haven’t you?’

  ‘Who hasn’t.’ He looked up. ‘Nari, it sounds…I don’t think it’s right—’

  ‘It’s supposed to be for anyone with a loved one or a relative who’s sick.’

  ‘Pheron’s not a relative.’

  ‘Oh, Zadyuk…!’

  He turned on the bed, drawing both feet up to face away, his back curved toward her, flat and detailless before the lamp’s red fire from the table corner. She looked for the mole just below his right shoulder blade and the three small freckles scattered high on his left. (They were so familiar to her. But did he know they were even there?) Vertebrae, blades, muscle, and the troughs between were all flattened under a blood-colored glow. Zadyuk said: ‘I don’t even know where it’s supposed to be.’

  ‘I heard from two of the old women who work in the yard next to mine that,’ and she stepped around the table, ‘it’s somewhere in the Spur—’

  ‘Well, I’d heard that. I meant where in the Spur.’

  ‘They said there’s a tavern.’ Standing before the lamp, her shadow darkened Zadyuk’s back and the bed he sat on. ‘Under it, an old cellar’s been dug out. Some ancient crypt, I think, that used to be used for…well, I didn’t really understand that part. But so many people are going—so many people are sick—we’ll find out how to get there by the time the Carnival starts tomorrow. Someone will tell us. And I want to go, Zadyuk.’

  A man shrieked outside, followed by laughter—with four or five other laughs joining. Clear light moved below their window. (Zadyuk and Nari both looked back.) Yellow swung under the ceiling’s thatch. Someone was passing below, holding high an expensive brand whose butter-white flame bleached the red about them to pink, before the deeper maroon refilled the roo
m.

  When Nari looked back, Zadyuk had gotten up to stand beside her. He blinked down at her with eyes a little too close-set for his heavy features (but, she always said, she liked it), then turned to lift the lamp. ‘We’ll go. If we can find out where.’ He blew it out. ‘And we will.’

  She reached for him in the dark, again, to be, as she had been for years now, surprised by his body’s sheer size. She felt him set the clay lamp back on the table. His arms went round her.

  8.4 A few weeks back, before going off to the laundry, Nari had put out some apricots, pears, plums, and peaches on the stone slab up on the roof, which the sun had already shriveled to a tart, chewy sweetness. With the skin behind his ears still chill from the cold water he’d splashed on his face at the roof trough, and gnawing around a pit, Zadyuk stepped out on a street the color of drab pear and, where the sun between the buildings across from him hit the wall, dusty apricot.

  The little girl wandering down the dawnward alley was fat, no more than seven, and naked. She carried a stick like a staff. Someone had taken a cat’s skull, run the shaft in the neck hole and out one eye, whipping the yellowed bone to the upper end with half a dozen loops of leather.

  At first he thought she was wearing a mask over her eyes, but it was only a smear of charcoal or makeup.

  She looked odd and infinitely cute. As he grinned at her, the notion seized him. ‘You’re going to the Carnival today?’ he called. Wait a minute. I have something for you. Just a moment—’ He ducked back in the door, noticing that she hadn’t stopped at his call, though her morning amble had no particular dispatch.

  Less than a minute later, he was back out the door, more dried fruit in one hand and holding a piece of cloth in the other.

  She was still there. As he came across the street, she planted her cat-skull staff in the dust and stopped, looking up at him with dark and dark-banded eyes.

  ‘Here.’ Zadyuk squatted before her. ‘These are for you. You can take them to the Carnival.’ His hands was full of prunes and dried peaches.

  From a thong around her neck, an astrolabe hung against her round, brown chest. She was holding three toy balls against her stomach with her other hand. She and Zadyuk looked back and forth between the fruit he held out and the toys she clutched, both realizing that she couldn’t possibly take them without abandoning the balls or the staff. She said at last, nodding toward the fruit: ‘Well, I don’t like those anyway. I’m not going to the Carnival.’

  ‘Oh,’ Zadyuk said. ‘And…what about this?’ He held out the cloth.

  It was a black-and-orange remnant Pheron had decided he was going to throw away, when Nari had rescued it—only to decide herself that she thoroughly disliked it and could think of no use for it.

  ‘I’ll tie it around your shoulders, like a cape. Would you like that?’ He stuffed the fruit into the leather sack at his own waist. ‘For Carnival. Really, it’s very you,’ which was what Pheron always said when he brought him or Nari some little bit of this and that.

  After sucking her lower lip through half a minute’s deliberation (while Zadyuk wondered if he should be squatting so long), she said: ‘All right. But I’m not going to the Carnival. I’m going to the Calling of the Amnewor.’

  Half a dozen loose cords hung off the swatch. Zadyuk flipped it over her head while she ducked, blinking made-up eyes. Reaching beside her staff, he caught up one cord, pulled it loosely around her shoulder, and knotted it to another. ‘There.’ He stood—

  And a surprising cramp knotted his right calf. Pain pulsed hard enough to make him blink. He grunted but kept his smile. (How, he wondered wildly, do you explain to a strange child you’ve just given a present to that, inexplicably, you are now in crippling agony…?) With it came a sudden fancy: whatever entity she’d named was actually an ancient demon from before the reign of the nameless gods, and her pronouncement of it had brought this cramp down on him. (How idiotic! Zadyuk thought.) The air flickered before his eyes.

  The little girl said: ‘You’re a barbarian, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes…’ The pain peaked, then slipped away. Zadyuk stepped uneasily from one foot to the other.

  ‘Are you Kudyuk?’

  ‘Kudyuk’s my brother,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You’re going to like the Carnival,’ the girl said, nodding. ‘My father says the barbarians like Carnivals more than anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ Zadyuk said, ‘well, I’m not—’ at which point the sunlight falling on the back of his neck made him sneeze, obliterating his: going to the Carnival either. Still sore, his leg throbbed again.

  The little girl blinked.

  ‘—you’ll like it too,’ he managed to say.

  Then he turned and walked off along the street, feeling extraordinary silly. Overwhelmingly he wanted to turn back and ask her, where it was she’d said she was going? (Surely that was not to risk another cramp, or sneeze…?) But he had to check his stall, then stop by Crescent Alley to see if Pheron’s workshop were tightly secured. Carnival time always created more than enough mischief.

  On his way back he would stop by Pheron’s room, see how he was, if he needed anything, talk with him a bit if he was up for it. (Pheron had had one of his looms brought to his room. Sitting with him, watching him thrust the shuttle through quivering strings from shadow into sunlight, Zadyuk had thought: it’s as if his thinned arms and narrow back have become, for me, work itself. What has been pared away by the illness is all that’s in excess of labor. Why do I have this feeling so much less when I watch Nari lug wet cloth to lob it over the cart rail, or when I see my own stall porter drag in hide bales by the twisted yellow vines? Why does it vanish when I put knife or needle to leather?) He would leave Pheron the dried fruit.

  But he was not going to tell him about the Calling of the…whatever-it-was.

  8.5 ‘…You do not read Nabokov as a document of the times,’ writes Dillard on page 31 of Living by Fiction. I just wonder how she read the first third of Lohta, Pnin, or the ‘Introduction’ in Pale Fire. The Nevèrÿon series is, from first tale to last, a document of our times, thank you very much. And a carefully prepared one, too.

  So.

  Some documentation on Joey:

  8.51 Last summer while we stood together talking, leaning against the wall of McHale’s, next to the Fiesta, a heavy black woman came past in a black coat with sequins. She held the hand of a six or seven-year-old girl in a pink dress, her rough hair pigtailed and beribboned all over her head. They looked like a mother and daughter going to church in Harlem thirty years before. (I wondered if they had anything to do with any of the Broadway theaters down the block.) The little girl pointed at Joey and looked at her mother: ‘Momma, that’s Jesus Christ…?’

  The woman smiled, embarrassed. They passed on.

  Joey turned to me and gave me a big, disgusted grin. ‘Man, that happens to me a lot! What is it, they all think Jesus Christ looked like some toothless junky?’

  Once Joey volunteered to help put a roof on a church nearby that aided local indigents; in Joey’s case, they paid him with food and let him sleep on a cot in the basement. For much of that summer, every time I’d see him, he would complain about the money he’d have made if he’d done the work at standard carpenter’s wages. ‘That was a two-thousand-dollar roofing job. Two thousand dollars I could’ve got. But not me, man! Not fuckin’ Jesus Christ!’

  8.52 Another time he told me: ‘This guy takes me home with him—he’s forty-one. After we make it together, he brings me in the bath room with him and tells me to look in the mirror with him. “Look at yourself,” he says. “You’re thirty, and you look older than I do. You look sixty.” I don’t look like no fuckin’ sixty, do I?’

  Joey was thirty in July of ’83. (I was forty-one that April!) Whether he looks older than I do has never really struck me before. But there is certainly an ageless quality to his bony face that doesn’t fix itself easily to any year.

  8.53 This happened, as far as I can figure, ab
out thirteen hundred cases of AIDS ago (when the total was just under three thousand): I was sitting in the Fiesta with Luis.

  Joey’s white-and-black checked wool hunting shirt lay over the bar beside us. Joey had just ducked out to run after somebody for something and was supposed to be back in a minute.

  Luis is twenty-three, thin, hard, and rough looking. He’s half Irish and half Puerto Rican, with a story enough like Joey’s not to have to repeat it in detail: hustling, drugs, a wife a couple of years older than he is, somewhere in Brooklyn, who kicked him out permanently about a year and a half back, and a kid. Luis is also missing a handful of teeth, but he has a bridge, which, from time to time, he flips loose with his tongue and plays with in his mouth. Over the couple of years I’ve known him, he’s been Joey’s ‘partner’ about half that time. They trade Johns, share drugs, hang out with each other. I once asked him: ‘You two ever make it together?’ Luis shrugged: ‘I wouldn’t mind. But Joey don’t wanna. He’s got rules or something about that.’ They’re still fairly protective of each other. Of course the other half of the time they’re on the outs, speaking guardedly to one another, with tales to me and everyone else about how one or the other of them tried to do the other one in. To an outsider these changes, which may start from either one, seem eccentric and unpredictable. While we sat there, waiting for Joey to get back, I asked Luis: ‘Are you two worried about AIDS? I mean, after all, both of you guys are working men.’ (‘Working men’ and ‘working women’—interestingly, not ‘working girls’—are euphemisms on the strip for hustlers and hookers.) ‘And I know you been working pretty hard, here, recently, too.’