City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [120]
No one could have been less on the make than Joe. With the stocks he’d been given he earned extremely large sums every quarter, but he converted everything into cash and put the money in a large drawer. He’d fish out a thousand dollars and ask seriously if that would be enough for dinner. He was usually stoned by dinnertime. He always paid.
He lived in a big loft that was just two huge rooms on Greene Street. In the backroom were hundreds of boxes full of materials he might someday assemble into collages. The front room had a sitting area and a mattress on the floor and a radio tuned day and night to a country-and-western station. Joe worked his way through one mammoth Victorian novel after another. At two in the morning he’d finish Middlemarch and start The Way We Live Now. He seldom said much about them except that they were good or that he’d liked them. Or he’d say, “What about that Dorothea!” and smile his big goofy smile.
In the late sixties and early seventies he’d been a speed freak, which had enabled him to do hundreds and hundreds of tiny collages. When I knew him, he still did book covers for his friends Ron Padgett and John Ashbery and Kenward Elmslie. He’d also over the years done lots of hilarious variations on the comic-strip character Nancy. Perhaps he was best known for his book I Remember, in which he just listed all the things he could remember—the ultimate dandy’s book since the method of a dandy is to level all hierarchies and replace all normal value systems with the arbitrariness of taste and personality.
Typically, the book read:
I remember fishnet.
I remember board and brick bookshelves.
I remember driving in cars and doing landscape paintings in my head (I still do that).
Joe had long been a friend of Warhol’s and had even anticipated Pop Art in an early painting called 7-Up, abandoning that approach when he saw Andy’s work. He collaborated with Jasper Johns on a painting. His favorite work, however, was drawing. He would draw Kenward’s beautiful dog Whippoorwill or his own foot, or he would draw a boy’s legs in athletic socks or a sleeping nude man. His work was either cool and insouciant Americana or it was funny. He seldom painted, but when he did, the results were highly original and convincing. Once he did a parody of Wyeth’s painting by showing Whippoorwill dragging his long white body across the grass toward a house.
Joe would spend every summer in Calais, Vermont, with Kenward. During the summer months we’d all receive letters from Joe in his big, bold script spelling out what he was reading (Great Expectations, Portrait of a Lady) and gossip about who’d come to stay.
In the midst of this very regular life (reading, dinners out in fancy restaurants, very occasional tricks, constant country-and-western music, summers in Vermont), Joe fell violently in love with my old love Keith McDermott. Keith had moved back to New York after several years away in Los Angeles. I had slept with Joe a few times but it hadn’t really worked out in bed. Now Joe was overwhelmed by Keith’s looks. Whenever Keith would appear in a play, Joe would deluge him with roses. Joe was a romantic man in the most old-fashioned way, and Keith responded to the lavish treatment. Keith was also very attracted to Joe. Keith had always liked eccentrics and bohemians. With his Armani suits and vast resources of cash and his becalmed, unproductive days and nights after so many years of amphetamine-driven work, Joe appealed to Keith’s horror of the middle class and his yearning for the unusual.
Perhaps their affair started because