Blackbird Read online

  I want to say a couple of other things about the book that don’t fit neatly into my explication of the title. Larry’s portrait of small town bohemianism in the form of Marshall MacNeill and his friends is precisely and beautifully drawn, like his description of Libby (dressed in a “red paisley muu-muu sort of dress and with no shoes and about thirty-seven bracelets on each arm … dragging a big dirty macramé purse”) and of Marshall’s car Bob Saab (“There was a pile of debris on the seat that included one, maybe two complete changes of clothing, half a ham-on-rye, a copy of Another Roadside Attraction … and one mateless rubber-tire-soled sandal somewhat the worse for wear”). Even more than the references to the music of the time, these characters bring back for me the mid-seventies in all their grungy glory, and Larry’s portrait of them and their milieu is, for me, one of the great pleasures of the book. I also want to point out the joyful account of Johnnie Ray’s sexual initiation by Marshall (Chapters 15 and 16, if you want to skip directly to it). As in real life, awkwardness alternates with excitement, uncertainty with single-mindedness, and all of it is rendered in rich sensual and erotic detail that, honestly, could raise the dead. It’s tender and funny and completely credible.

  II.

  Blackbird was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1986 by Michael Denneny, a senior editor there who was, more than anyone else in New York publishing, responsible for bringing into print the works of gay male writers in the decade between 1985 and 1995. Many of the writers who were published during that time, by St. Martin’s and other publishers, are dead now, victims of AIDS. Most of the work not only of those deceased writers but even writers like Larry, who survived the plague years, is out of print, seldom referred to and, one assumes, forgotten. This is a real loss to American letters and American literary history comparable, I believe, to the decades’ long neglect of the Harlem Renaissance writers that I can only hope doesn’t take as long to be acknowledged and remedied.

  In the emerging orthodoxy of gay male writing, writers like Edmund White, Larry Kramer, and Andrew Holleran are considered the “post-Stonewall” generation of gay writers. This designation has always seemed misleading to me, however, because those writers, born in the 1940s, were already young adults when the mass gay movement triggered by Stonewall began to emerge in the early 1970s. Their books, I would argue – at least the books they published in the 1970s – revealed attitudes about homosexuality more consistent with the closeted 1950s. In my view, it is my generation of gay writers, born roughly between the mid-’50s and the mid-’60s, who are more aptly characterized as post-Stonewall writers in that our attitudes regarding homosexuality were shaped in part by the formative years of gay liberation.

  The sea-change in consciousness is, as I have already observed, reflected in that passage in Blackbird in which Johnnie Ray realizes that his hope for emotional and sexual fulfillment can only be realized with another gay boy. To understand why this is significant, compare the chapters in Blackbird that describe Johnnie Ray’s joyful sexual initiation to the passage in Holleran’s 1978 Dancer from the Dance in which his nominal hero has his first gay sexual experience: performing a blow job on a stranger. Holleran’s character reflects that he has “profaned utterly” his mouth and that his lips “had been soiled beyond redemption.” Don’t misunderstand me – Andrew Holleran is a writer of enormous gifts, but his homosexuals are as filled with loathing for themselves and one another as the characters from the seediest gay pulp novel of the 1950s.

  Self-loathing is conspicuously absent from Blackbird, and in this sense it is a work representative of our generation of writers. There’s anxiety, loneliness, and rage in the work of these writers, as there is in Blackbird, and their characters often undergo tribulations as demeaning and traumatic as the exorcism forced upon Johnnie Ray by his parents. Moreover, as the memoirs of these writers also make clear (the autobiographical essays collected in John Preston’s series of anthologies, for example), these experiences of childhood and adolescence left deep scars and created systems of defense that continued to disfigure and make difficult their adult lives. But there was no lapsing into the kind of obliterating self-hatred that characterized preceding generations of gay men. There was, instead, a recognition that the situation of gay men was not one of moral defectiveness but of social and political oppression to which the proper response was not to change ourselves, but society. Although Blackbird is not overtly political – because Larry was telling a story, not delivering a polemic – it is, in fact, radical in its implicit assumption that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Johnnie Ray’s sexuality. It is natural, basic to his being and, of course, should be freely expressed. The implications of that revolutionary position, in the face of centuries of condemnation of homosexuality in the West buttressed by selective readings of religious texts, are still making themselves known. The cohort of writers to which Larry belonged was the first to systematically adopt this position as the moral premise of its writing about homosexuality.

  Larry was thirty when he finished Blackbird, his second novel. Many of the other gay male writers published in the mid-to-late 1980s were also young, bursting with energy, and filled with the obvious influences of writers they admired (for Larry, Tom Robbins) as they struggled to find their own authentic voices. One would have expected that, between 1986 and now, Larry would have produced another half-dozen novels or more of ever-increasing confidence and craft. Instead, he would publish only two more books, Tangled Up in Blue (1989) and Captain Swing (1993).

  What happened? Elsewhere, Larry has said that he was disheartened because his books were not the commercial successes he had hoped for and, as a natural-born performer, he found the isolation of writing to be temperamentally difficult. I certainly don’t doubt that these were factors that led him to withdraw from writing, but they are not sufficient explanation. Larger forces were at work. New York publishers lost interest in gay writers after it became clear that publishing them would not improve the bottom line – and the haste with which these publishers dumped gay writers is testimony to the deep-seated homophobia of the New York publishing industry. A more basic reason is that AIDS happened and many of those gay writers died.

  There is a long passage in Larry’s last published novel, Captain Swing, in which an older, wiser Johnnie Ray, who has returned to Louisiana to see his dying father, is warned by his aunt, “I don’t believe you’ve seen this kind of sick.” But Johnnie Ray has: “I wanted to tell her about Crockett Miller, my friend … whom AIDS had reduced to a sixty-some-odd pound skeleton with skin before finally finishing him off at the age of thirty-two.” He then goes on to name several other friends who died in the epidemic before concluding: “All that beauty and more, all that talent and more, gone gone gone, bye-bye baby and Amen, struck down in the relative youth of late twenties and thirty-something by an elusive, ever mutating viral horror that doesn’t just kill you dead, but kills you ugly.” That’s what it was like for all of us before the advent of the wonder drugs and now that, in the gay community, the dying has almost stopped, no one wants to talk about the carnage, much less read about it anymore. We who lived through it are left with survivor’s guilt and unexpressed trauma, like the shell-shocked survivors of the Great War who returned from the trenches with their heads full of horror to a world that had decided to move on. I wonder if one reason Larry stopped writing is that it seemed to him – as it seemed to me – that there was no longer an audience for the things he had to say.

  I hold out a hope that Larry will find his voice and give us further adventures in the life of Johnnie Ray, but until then I am grateful to Arsenal Pulp for having the good sense and the good taste to re-issue this little gem of a book.

  1. I’m going to dispense with the convention of literary criticism that insists the critic keep the subject at bay by referring to him or her by last name only even if in actuality they’re best friends. Larry and I were not best friends, but when we both lived in Los Angeles we were friendly colleagues, and thou
gh I have not seen him in many years, I have an abiding affection for him.

  Blackbird

  Chapter One

  I dreamed I was dancing the waltz with Sal Mineo.

  He was young, about the age when he did Crime in the Streets, which is about my age now. He was very beautiful, and about two inches shorter than me, and he smelled of Old Spice.

  I remember feeling awkward, my feet unsure of which way to go. I kept saying, “But I don’t know how to waltz.”

  And Sal Mineo said, “Don’t worry; just follow me.”

  I woke up suddenly, as if awakened by a loud noise. My underpants were wet and sticky. And it was time to get up for school.

  “Talent is beauty,” Efrem was saying, just as Todd Waterson shouldered his way through the choir room’s double doors. Which would have made a nice little cinematic segue, since Todd was not what I would call a major talent in any art form, but could have written the book on being beautiful. I thought of the juxtaposition of Efrem’s remark and Todd’s entrance in terms of film, both because I love movies and because last year, when Efrem signed my yearbook, he wrote, “May your life be a movie in which you are Orson Welles: Write it – direct it – star in it.”

  I suppose I’ve almost always thought of my life as a movie, but since Efrem wrote that to me, even more so.

  It was about fifteen minutes before first period, and Efrem and I were hanging around the choir room, something we did quite a bit. Lots of people do, since the choir room is one of the nicer rooms in the entire school, and since Mr. Elmgreen doesn’t seem to mind if half the student body uses it as sort of a combination clubhouse and union hall before and after school and during lunch. Efrem wasn’t even in choir, but many of the people who like to frequent the choir room aren’t. We were straddling a couple of chairs up on the top tier of the room, up against the cupboards where Mr. Elmgreen stores the sheet music and percussion instruments and such. Just killing some time. Efrem was reading Valley of the Dolls for maybe the thirtieth time – it’s his all-time favorite novel. The Foley twins were crouching in opposite corners of the room, plucking out a passable version of “Dueling Banjos” on guitars. There were maybe twenty or so other kids sitting around the room, reading or talking or strumming their guitars and singing softly to themselves.

  I watched Todd clump-clump his way up the first tier, then the second, headed toward the back of the room; I must admit I was only half listening to what Efrem was saying. Todd was wearing his favorite pair of hand-tooled Tony Lama lizard-skin cowboy boots, with toes so pointy you could knit booties with them. And a pair of faded old Levi’s hanging so low on his hips that his hip-bones were visible between the top of his pants and the bottom of his bright yellow HERE TODAY – GONE TO MAUI t-shirt. He looked hotter than a wood-pit barbeque. Todd was long-legged and bow-legged; and the way he walked in those boots and those Levi’s, boys and girls, you best believe that was quite an eyeful. I have on more than one occasion followed Todd Waterson around school, ending up at a class I didn’t have, just watching him walk. I hate to use an expression as hackneyed as “poetry in motion,” but that’s exactly the expression that came to my mind every time I saw Todd walk.

  (My own walk is, I fear, much more functional than decorative. Marshall Two-Hawks MacNeill once described it as “somewhere between Bette Davis and Groucho Marx. Long, quick strides, face forward, eyes straight ahead, looking like somebody with someplace to go, by golly.” But that was later.)

  “After all,” Efrem was saying, “time and gravity will sooner or later take its toll on even the most beautiful face and body, but talent – ”

  I’d heard this one before. It’s one of Efrem’s favorite subjects, probably because Efrem is under the mistaken impression that he’s not very good-looking. Which he is. Besides, Efrem likes to use me as sort of a warm-up audience; he’s perfecting his spiels in preparation for when he gets famous, so he repeats himself quite a bit. I fully expect someday to pick up the New York Times Book Review and read: “Efrem Zimbalist Johnson – Talent Is Beauty.”

  Efrem is a writer. I’m a singer. Anyway, I’m going to be.

  Efrem Zimbalist Johnson is the closest thing to a real live Best Friend I’ve had since Martin Kirkland in the fourth grade. I feel a certain kinship toward Efrem, not the least reason being that we were both named after somebody famous. I was named after Johnnie Ray, the singer, whose biggest hit was “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” back in 1951. Efrem was named, not after the granite-faced television actor most famous for his portrayal of Inspector What’s-His-Name in “The F.B.I.,” but after that Efrem Zimbalist’s father, the great concert violinist. It was Efrem’s father (from whom Efrem inherited his particular brand of pale-skinned brunet looks) who named him.

  “I was expected to be,” Efrem explained to me on more than one occasion, “the greatest American-born concert violinist this nation had ever seen. That was my father’s dream for me. I hope,” he would say, “I will not disappoint him too badly for becoming … the things I have become.”

  This was, of course, before what was later to become known (all too euphemistically, I’m afraid) as “the accident.” It was after the accident, after his wounds had scabbed over (the visible ones, anyway), after much of his seemingly unflappable self-assurance and basic deep-down belief in his own superiority over most other mortals had returned to him that Efrem scrawled in the inside cover of my senior yearbook (in his inimitable ass-backwards southpaw writing):

  To a Black Star (Young, Gifted, and Black – and That’s a Fact!)

  Love and kisses, Efrem.

  A.K.A., the Divine Mr. J.

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself again.

  So Efrem is going full steam into his Talent-Is-Beauty sermonette, and Todd Waterson is toting his Ovation round-back acoustic guitar up the tiers. Todd wasn’t in choir, either – he just liked to stow his guitar up on top of the back cupboards while he was in class, and he’d come in during lunch period and park in a corner and strum. Anyway, he’s got the guitar in his right hand and his basic blue everybody’s-got-one-just-like-it backpack full of books in his left, and (I immediately notice) – he’s not wearing any underwear. And his dick is quite discernible indeed plastered up against one side of the crotch of those jeans, and his balls are sort of bunched up on the other side; and I suppose I should have looked away immediately or at least tried to tune back into what Efrem was saying, but of course I didn’t. And next thing you know I’m starting to get hard.

  Which is not what you’d call a rare occurrence for me. Erection seems to be my middle name lately. I’ll pop a class-A boner while reading anything remotely sexual in a book (Efrem likes to read the juicier parts of Valley of the Dolls aloud, just to watch me get all hot and bothered); during just about any love scene in any movie; at the sight of a men’s underwear ad (except ones like J.C. Penney’s, where the models’ crotches have been airbrushed away); at the very thought of Skipper Harris, or (more recently) Marshall – but that comes later, as I said. And, as often as not, I’ll get hard for no real reason at all, as if my dick just wants to let me know it’s still there. And the sight of Todd Waterson’s faded denim crotch (which, as he reached the upper tier of the room where Efrem and I sat, hovered dangerously at eye level) had me well on my way to a full-on throbber within mere fractions of a second. After attempting with some difficulty to cross my legs, I retrieved my three-ring binder from the floor beside my chair and plopped it onto my lap.

  “How’s it goin’, Johnnie Ray?” Todd flipped his hair back as he reached us. Todd’s hair was very blond and very straight and quite long in the front, so that an average of six thousand times a day his hair fell across one eye in an effect more than slightly reminiscent of Veronica Lake, and he would flip it back with a quick little backward neck motion. I generally dislike that particular habit, but on Todd it was quite sexy.

  “How’s it goin’, Todd?” I had only recently come to realize that the question How’s it goin’ is
entirely rhetorical. Time was when I would go into fifteen minutes on just how it really was going, causing more than one person to regard me as if I had taken leave of my senses.

  “How’s it goin’, Efrem?” Todd made a modified hook-shot with his Ovation, landing it onto the top of the cupboard nearest Efrem.

  “How’s what goin’, Todd?” Efrem rolled his eyes in that way he has when addressing someone he considers far beneath him – which is one long list, believe me. Efrem didn’t like Todd very much. He said it was because Todd possessed the intellect of a staph infection, but I also think Efrem was more than a little bit jealous of Todd’s looks. As I say, Efrem doesn’t have the highest regard for his own looks, and Todd was practically a shoo-in for Best-Looking of our graduating class. Who wouldn’t be a little jealous? I was.

  “You gonna audition today?” Todd asked me. Todd wasn’t in Drama either, but he hung around the Drama room, too. Even though he wasn’t particularly creative, I think he just liked to be around those of us who are. Or think we are.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You’ll get a part,” he said. “No sweat.”

  “Thanks. Wish I was as sure as you are.”

  “Yeah.”

  Yeah. Well, I never said Efrem didn’t have a point – Todd wasn’t exactly Mensa material. Efrem said he was only getting through high school on his pretty face, which may well have been true. Still, Todd Waterson was one extremely decorative dude. And, frankly, I’ve always been a sucker for good old skin-deep physical beauty. I mean, if I want scintillating conversation, I can watch All About Eve. Or, heaven knows, talk to Efrem.

  “Well, good luck, anyhow,” Todd said, making as if to leave.

  “So how’s Leslie?” I asked him, just to keep the conversation going for a moment longer while I enjoyed the view. Todd had been going steady with Leslie Crandall, the only daughter of our pastor over at the Baptist church, since roughly the dawn of time.