City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [111]
Several times we had lunch together at a restaurant called Binibon on Second Avenue. My friend John Purcell and I called the restaurant Twisty-Tables because of the way the tables were set at strange angles to each other. A famous murder was committed at the Binibon in 1981 by Jack Abbott, the author of In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott had been released from prison, where he’d been confined for forgery and bank robbery; his sentence had been increased by twenty-one years when he’d stabbed a fellow inmate. Abbott was given early parole due to Norman Mailer’s vouching for his character, but the day before his book was published in July, he killed a Binibon waiter. The whole sorry episode coincided with the end of the Leftish idealism of the seventies. Reagan was just about to be elected.
I wrote the catalog for Black Males, an early Mapplethorpe exhibit, this one in Amsterdam in 1980 at the Galerie Jurka. I argued that whenever a white man in America looks at a black man, it is a complex and guilty act and that Mapplethorpe went through the repertory of possible responses (art deco figurine, sex object, etc.). Later the black poet Essex Hemphill attacked me (and Mapplethorpe, who was dead by then) for objectifying blacks. He singled out the picture of Mapplethorpe’s lover Milton Moore in Man in a Polyester Suit in which the model’s penis is shown emerging from his fly but his head is cut off. In a debate in a gay magazine I pointed out that Milton had made Mapplethorpe sign a contract promising he would never show his penis and his face in the same frame because he, Milton, didn’t want his family to know he was gay. One could also have argued that the French word for a camera lens is objectif, and that there is no way of not objectifying someone in a photo.
When Robert had to go to Amsterdam for the opening of his show, he asked me to babysit Milton, who was pretty crazy (eventually he tried to swim the Hudson to New Jersey). He seemed a sweet man, Milton, though he was overwhelmed by Robert’s New York life and would take a dictionary with him to dinner parties to keep up with the big words the others were saying. Before he died of AIDS in 1989 at age forty-two, Robert received a letter from Milton, who’d been convicted of murdering a man with a lead pipe and was serving time in an Alabama prison. He asked if he could borrow three thousand dollars. I don’t know whether Robert sent the money.
When Robert and I were friends, he didn’t have much money. Sam Wagstaff had undoubtedly bought him his loft, as later he would buy him a bigger one on Twenty-third Street. Robert didn’t seem to have much spending money. In 1980 we did a story on Truman Capote together for the glossy, semi-gay theater magazine After Dark, and another article for SoHo News on William Burroughs in 1981. I doubt if Robert had ever read either writer (or my books for that matter), but that didn’t seem a requirement. At the United Nations Plaza, where we arrived on a June day, the air-conditioning was on the blink and Capote met us at the elevator in bare feet and with a palmetto fan in hand. All through the interview Capote kept dashing out of the room to sniff more cocaine. He went through phases of being sharp-witted and nearly nagging and other moments of mumbling incoherence, as if someone were alternately pumping air into the balloon and deflating it. Robert was accompanied by his handsome assistant, a James Dean lookalike, Marcus Leatherdale, who later became a well-known photographer in his own right. Capote seemed quite uninterested in any of us, though at the very end he told me he’d read some of my stuff and been impressed with it. “You’ll probably write some good books,” he said. “But remember, it’s a horrible