Read Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s for Free Online

Besides falling stars, the other major natural phenomenon that year was jellyfish, little vermillion globs that washed up on shore and which we counted, scared now of going into the water. We took turns showering by emptying on each other buckets of water cranked from a pump. Howard brought along a Polaroid camera, and we made lots of purple-tinted photos that we scattered on the back porch. Our only neighbor was a hippie nudist with a big untamed gray beard who sat on his slanted shingle roof and stared. We never exchanged a word, but did joke that he was the spirit of Gay Love, watching over us. At night we drank acidic Astor Place red wine we’d lugged out, and ate hot dogs, pinto beans, and Spam. Having filled in our negligible romantic pasts for each other, we’d begun trading more detailed backgroundinformation. Howard told me about having been on the wrestling team in junior high school in Great Neck. He had recently, awkwardly, run into his coach at Cowboys, a hustler bar on the East Side. I found it sexy that he had been a wrestler and leeringly fantasized some.
    Skunk Hollow clinched our deal. This really was first love for me. I’d had crushes, as had Howard, on straight boys, or assumed straight boys, all through high school and college. I think for gay guys, at least of that generation, the adolescent spring of first love, the pang often described in short stories, was invariably arrested. I suppose we were still recovering from fifties’ childhoods in a repressive society, where there was no such thing as “gay” or “coming out.” Most of us experienced our first love in our mid-twenties, in the seventies. And even though the smell and pitch of fast sex was palpable on every street downtown, so, too, were aching hearts and love-tossed looks. The seventies had a romantic aura because of so much first love among grown men. Howard and I said “I love you” for the first time in that cabin, and the tenor was far more resonant than anything I’d experienced with boyfriends I’d been dating until then. I forget who went first. But we didn’t do much talking about issues beyond that. I woke up the last morning with a choke of a cry, surprising myself, not telling Howard. From then on, we made an effort every summer to re-create that time together, the axis on which our world revolved, ever faster. Our bond was sealed with a look, the look I first got from Howard at the Ninth Circle, and again there, that last day on the beach.
    The next year involved lots of walking. Either I walked to Howard’s gigantic loft in the East Village, or he to my little shoeboxin the West. That walk is bookmarked in my mind along with a gas station on Prince Street, lonely, moonlit Prince Street. When I saw that incongruous gas station, never open, its solitary Edward Hopper pump always seeming as if it belonged in a small American town of the 1920s, I knew that I was getting close. I was always walking to Howard’s place in the dark, after I finished my “homework” (I was back in graduate school, taking one more year of classes). Even closer was St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mott. If we walked by together, Howard would reiterate that Martin Scorsese had gone to that church as a little boy and been inspired to moviemaking by its stained-glass windows and the stories they told. I would only make the reverse commute during daylight hours. My mental bookmark for remembering the reverse walk was turning down a decrepit cobblestone alley, around noon, after having brunch, and hearing Deborah Harry’s wailing “Heart of Glass” from a passing car radio—a one-time event—accompanied by a quick, fleeting flash of the awareness of being alive.
    We had a poetic kick-off season. I know because some of the poems and letters that we wrote to each other have survived in this or that file or storage bin. I also know, reading back through the worn pages, that we were both already a bit sliced up by life, and that all