Free Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch

pasts. But, mostly, we were pleased, thrilled, to be who we were, with each other, where we were, then. Nostalgia has not sprinkled fake gold confetti on the before- and just-after-1980 period in New York. We knew it then. I remember conversations as you’d be walking down the street, and say, or have said to you, “Isn’t New York amazing?” Europeans would come for the weekend. Howard and I weren’t Studio 54 types (though I used to bartend at early parties there for grad school tuition money), but Bob Colacello, writing for Warhol’s Interview , said that friends would get off the plane from the Philippines, or Berlin, and take a taxi straight to Studio. That kind of energy filtered down or, more probably, filtered up as Studio was the final bloom of a lot of exotic gay-disco plants with names like Twelve West, the Loft, Truck Stop, Flamingo, Le Jardin. Youcould feel inventiveness or freedom just walking down the street, as in the trend of guys’ not wearing underwear, and having holes in the ripped crotches and seams of their jeans. A hint of hairy balls was fashionable.
    A quality Howard and I shared with our zeitgeist (and may have tweaked by zoning out with our addictions) was the ability to step outside our bodies and see hilarity in ordinary life situations. Sometime in the eighties, Jackson Browne released a single, “Lawyers in Love.” I remember when I first heard the song having a mental image of Howard and me negotiating the many clauses of our relationship. A journal entry of his that I found from the time gives the flavor of some of the content of our analyzing: “I have something to lose in losing Brad. Is it more than companionship? Social connections? Career connections?” He’d say some such out loud, and then he or I would get a glint in our eye, as if it were a joke that we were in on. The joke was that we were both sure we’d be together forever. That punch line was the bottom line of our love. And our apartment helped by morphing into its own at-home version of a club, or did on nights when we had big parties. Perhaps the more gnarly the personal issues, the more we decided to open out the cast of characters. I only remember crowded explosions of unlikely types separated by the ding-dong of the downstairs bell that I’d clomp down to answer, while Howard turned the music way the fuck up (“This ain’t no party. / This ain’t no disco”), and poured tumblers of scotch firewater. I once heard from a girlfriend of Howard’s original boy-crush Kevin of Great Neck who remembered those parties, and Kevin at them: “He was such a complicated person—tender and ridiculous and scary and exhilarating. I don’t think I ever got over him.” Her one-line reminiscence—jagged, romantic, capsized—capturesthose bleary nights that we never “got over” better than any reconstructed nosegay of numb faces and names.
    Because of those parties, and because we were in lawyerly love, in a cool fashion that didn’t exclude others, our social life expanded. Some who had been friends of one or the other became friends of both. I had known Joe LeSueur since I’d been the boyfriend of J. J. Mitchell—they had both been intimate friends of Frank O’Hara, Joe having lived with the poet for over a decade, through four apartments. Then he had been a cute blond button. Now he was one of a species of gay tribal priests, preserving an entire history of underground gossip about gay, or simply bohemian, writers and artists, their sex and love lives and the backstories of their work that was still taboo (or concerned figures then of little public interest) for general publication and consumption, and so was only passed on through oral history. Once a month or so, Joe would have dinner parties of all guys crammed around a table in his teeny walk-up apartment on Second Avenue at First Street. On the walls I remember a big, blowzy, blue Joan Mitchell abstract oil painting that she had given to Joe; a Joe