If I had been told what “Flippancy” was about I would have shrugged and yawned and gone my way but looking at the surprising first paragraph I was sparked to sit up in my seat and pay better attention. I was hooked too. Because what the characters decide, ‘he’ and ‘she’, has less to do with the fate of a potential candidate for tenure but their own survival as a sexual couple.
Alexander Motyl paints the prospects of ‘he’ and ‘she’ in an almost philosophic mien, reminding me of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with an uptight Simone about to leave the exasperating but smirking Jean Paul. Is this a game that he is playing with her? Does ‘she’ suspect it is nothing but a game for his philosophic amusement?
The novella opens up a few days after September 11 when ‘he’ and ‘she’ have returned from New Orleans, finger-screwing throughout their flight while at the same time the WorldTradeCenter was being destroyed. Talk about neurosis setting in but ‘he’ seems unperturbed by the events and looks bemused though it all. As usual, in her Simone garb, ‘she’ is outraged; anyway their relationship had been going nowhere for past six years.
Still it’s time for their colleagues to elect a prospective candidate for tenure, both highly qualified and respected. They are almost at a tie when ‘he’ proposes they flip a coin to pick a winner. Silence befalls the befuddled learned academic group as they stagger out, agreeing to vote next week on a candidate.
Motyl shows us her in a room with him and thinking of her wasted life that seems to have frittered by. It’s a portrait of a highly educated woman now seemingly at a loss of what to do, pursuing her relationship with him or ending it and changing her life. Needless to say, ‘he’ answers in bemused riddles. At the appointed college meeting ‘she’ too decides on flipping a coin just as ‘he’ did last week and the other professors agree. But is it so easy as a mere flip?
Motyl, a college professor himself and author of “Whiskey Priest” and “Who Killed Andy Warhol” two highly acclaimed full-length novels, has hit upon another winner with the short novella “Flippancy.” It has enough sexual arousal and intellectual tension to keep the pages flipping, so to speak, and turning until you get to a resolution, which eventually and surprisingly comes. I highly recommend it because I thoroughly enjoyed it. You might even decide to on a flip of a coin…
In the early 1960s I picked up a battered used copy of City of Night by John Rechy, who was to become my ideal of a street-smart hustling writer, one I very much grew to admire. On the cover was the image of a man in a raincoat standing in New York’s nighttime 42nd Street…and I imagined I waited behind him as he crossed the street and made his way to a nearby hotel…Because that’s what was done on 42nd Street, two fairies going after each other, wasn’t it?
Yet until then, before John Rechy, I hardly even glanced into a book, much less tried to read one, having dropped out of high school when I was old enough to do so, but this book had me intrigued. Not only did the cover entice me in, but a few pages into the reading of it I found out that Rechy hustled his way from El Paso to Los Angles to New Orleans and into New York’s Times Square. I wanted to do just that, and boy, was I hooked! Reading it as if spellbound day after day after day…
Because from where I came, New York’s Lower East Side,this book was just typical faggot drivel which lauded the uptown way of life with its wimpy sick Times Square compared to the dangerous gangster streets which I was more accustomed to. But I stole into those same wimpy streets at night and secretly began to prowl through them, entering darkened movie theaters, standing, watching and following stranger after stranger into bathrooms, where for just a little while our fingers would meet and we would share our hardships with each other, then disappear into the darkened softness of the night. Was I looking for a John Rechy in the darkness or someone as good looking as him? In either case, the city of night had become my feast of delirious pleasure…one that I longed for and chased after…
But unfortunately the 1960s fled by much too quickly with its hippies and radicals heralding us into the ‘70s and the ‘80s. Eventually I had to take a break from all the chaos I was dwindling into and try to return back to life, which meant going back to school…and strange, but I did just that. College was a bitch, considering I had never gotten out of high school, but getting an equivalency diploma was a good start and I was on my way. By the end of five years I had become someone who had been a drop-out and nowwas a Columbia University graduate…big deal, right?
I began dreaming of my old haunts in Times Square, the movie theaters, maybe I could go back to what once had been?…But of course I couldn’t…Though I had avoided those midtown streets during my college years, I dared to enter them now, only to discover that AIDS had decimated and almost erased it all. Had I been destined to live and die as one? How did I avoid the decimation? It could be seen on the men’s thin, gaunt faces as they staggered the streets and slowly dwindled into nothingness — becoming just another name on some forgotten AIDS memorial quilt…
Locked in myself I began to drink heavily and where once it was sex that controlled me, it now was booze that had its hold over me. Sucking up to alcohol one Christmas night in 1986 I picked up a razor and automatically slashed my own wrist…the most natural thing to do…and that night in Bellevue Hospital the other natural thing was to have the shrink say I wasn’t that dangerous to myself or others, which he did…
Drunks are born liars, I’d heard him say, looking at me…and that morning, after being tossed out of Bellevue, I picked a pen and no matter how hard it was to hold one with a freshly slashed wrist, that’s exactly what I did, held a pen and wrote…
Which I’m still doing now…well, with a keyboard…I went through Holy Communion, my first novel, about a little boy facing himself, his past and future, followed by Stallers, Tales of a Masturbating Idiot, abook of interrelated tales about Times Square. But when I came to Vienna Dolorosa, a novel which I wrote every morning for the next three years, it was as if I were possessed by a wonderful spirit that held me until it was done. Vienna had freed me, in a way that alcohol could never do…
That was followed by Baby Doll, about a transvestite teenager who could pass perfectly and almost does, East River Stories and countless other tales. Little by little I was getting published by various small magazines, Paramour, Aphrodite Gone Berserk, Avalon Rising, Eidos and others. With the little money I was making from publication I could treat myself to a dinner…that’s about it. Ha! Typical. Was able to survive with various other jobs as a stagehand, apartment cleaner, gofer, whatever…Just as long as my writing was being done every morning.
Then in May 1997 I had a stroke that knocked me on my ass into a coma for three weeks, waking up to find myself like a little baby boy who didn’t know what was what and becoming so infantile that I was making kaka and pee-pee all over the place…Sure had a hell of a lot of relearning to undergo…
With the stroke I lost the use of my entire right side of my body, my right leg, right arm, right eyeball, with my mouth drooping to the right no matter how many physical exercises I performed. In time my body slowly, very slowly, came back to me and one night I awoke from a dream-filled sleep with the words Times Queer in my consciousness and on my lips. My entire Times Square life had been shown to me in a dream and now 42nd Streetwas bringing it back…
Though I hadn’t touched a pen or paper since the stroke three years earlier, that morning I sat down at the computer, which I had been using to teach myself to play games on, and started setting that dream down, typing it one letter, one word, one paragraph at a time.
Two years later I was able to renew my friendship with Sally Miller of Synergy Press, who had published one of my stories in the early nineties and who now agreed to publish Times Queer as a chapbook, withmy take on Rechy’s novel but with a tragic twist at the end. A few years after that she brought it out as a paperback, along with my other writings:
Next year, 2009, Sally Miller will be publishing 100 Whores, a look at the street smart women and men who had an effect of my life, emotionally and psychologically. And in between, M. Christian, ‘literary streetwalker’, periodically puts one of my stories and tales on his Frequently Felt blog; this is just one of them:
And what about that wonderful Sexual Outlaw, John Rechy? Every now and then I look at City of Night and wonder if I hadn’t picked it up and read it years ago, what would’ve happened then? Interesting question…probably teem myself with the drivel of the working class or force myself to live in the straight necktie world? Who knows?
Ha! Fat chance…Not me, because I found through experience and tears that life isn’t as bad as I expected or had been foretold it would be…
No, life is much better than before…a lot better! And even though I walk with a limp, hold things improperly and see things doubled-vision, change does come about if you let it…and in more ways than one…Just as long as you do it! I did it, you can too…Write, write, write! That’s the most important thing, writing, and more writing! Because what else is there, but writing? Do it whatever hours you chose; I do it from 5am to 7am, it works for me, other hours might work for you. (Of course that doesn’t count the time you put in to your editing.) But you never know…just do it! Anyway, that’s the best way out of this farce and sham of a life…
And the City of Night? Is it still out there? Of course it is,amongst my memories of movie theater rows, darkened bathrooms, up and down various stairs into the bliss of shyness, of touching, of groping, of feeling…
Oh my, it’s beautiful inside of darkened theaters! Just wait till you dream and feel it on your own…And I’ll be standing close to you…drawing nearer…very near…shyly looking and hoping…but nervously approaching…and luring you to follow into the city of night…Oh, my, what darkness! But what a wonderful city! The city of night…
My new novella, ‘My Father’s Semen’, will appear in “Cruising for Bad Boys” edited by Mickey Erlach due out June 2009 from STARbooks Press.
Also you can reach me via: mydem@comcast.netplus I’m under Amazon.com or take a look at my web page:
“Holding hands in the darkness at the movies could be an intensely erotic experience.”
I was maybe 15 or 16 years old and sneaking into various Times Square movie houses. Did it in through the back doors on 41st or 40th Streets, with someone leaving and me sneaking in; occasionally, I’d meet the brute of a man who simply refused to let me in and slammed the door after he left. But such a prim and proper disciplinarian was rare and I’d get in for free, most of times, with some hurrying-away movie viewer fading out of sight. I’d go in and watch a western or a war-entrenched movie and feel good afterwards. This was years before rampant sex tore through the area…And as I’d sit there, watching some battle with Japanese or Germans or some cowboys fleeing from the sheriff, I’d grow alert when someone sat down in a vacant seat next to mine. Mostly an older man, yet occasionally someone just a little older than I was; who was hoping and looking for some company…or so I thought.
These trysts never did go any further than mere holding hands and looking dreamily at each other, but after an hour or so I’d say, “Be right back…” and hurry off, pretending I was going to the bathroom or concession stand when really I was disappearing into the 42nd Street crowds. I think maybe it was four or five times that happened and I’d leave, still erect, and wander my way home where I masturbated for weeks on end with that cowardly memory…Why did I run? Why was I so horny and hot after?
I often thought of those anonymous faces over the years, those tricked, led-on, abandoned and forgotten so despicably and shamefully, when a single line in Victor Banis’ book brought it all back, “holding hands in the darkness at the movies could be an intensely erotic experience…”
How many times did I pass by the theaters in my later years and remember holding hands, feeling myself protected and cared for when all of a sudden that old fear came back to and I so stupidly faded off in to the crowds? Too many, too many…way too many…
Victor J. Banis, whose bibliography at the end of the book is amazing, --and boy, the wealth of material he has produced under various names and guises is truly remarkable--has produced such a book, a book of memories and lost times gone forever with just a flicker of remembrance. And gratefully Victor Banis has done it all and tells us just how he came to do these things while playing a truly rich and rewarding life experience.
Banis explores the “loneliest of all minorities,” --being gay in the straight world-- in the 1950s and 1960s when such tumultuous change loomed on the horizon. Back in the 1920s and 30s he notes, one didn’t give much mind about one’s sex yet in the 40s one paid attention since everyone was horny and hungry for it. But by the 50s it was frowned upon and put down, with yellow journalist Walter Winchell calling “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgenson” until it exploded in the 60s coming out all decorated in vibrant drag, so to speak, --in 1968 it erupted in a tirade of protest-full celebration that was to become Stonewall, never to be the same again.
Banis begins his biography by becoming a writer of gay stories that were published in Switzerland and then under various names in America. His fame, or ill-fame, grew until it exploded in a suit brought against him and his publisher by the US Post Office for obscene material, and this at a time when the government was after Henry Miller and Barney Rosset and others. The suit against Banis was gratefully dismissed, after they dragged it as long as they could and Banis, in need of a break from the stupidity that has always been a part of American history, got that break by traveling across Europe, and seeing and experiencing Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Franco’s Spain.
Once back home, he did a book tour that took him across the country, meeting with Hugh Hefner and other stars in Beverly Hills, --Nina Foch, Elizabeth Montgomery, Natalie Wood, Linda Ronstadt amongst others. His neighbor at the time was Sal Mineo, who eventually was slain in a botched homosexual robbery.
But most of all was Banis’ writing; as he did it each and every day for 365 days a year then just started all over the next year and did it all over again…as he’s still doing it. Among the many books he has written (under his name) The Why Not, Longhorns, Angel Land, Lola Dances among others, and under various nom de plumes a wealth of titles, for male and female readers alike.
As a writer he is truly amazing! Plus for other writers who are still undergoing the process of slow learning he recommends “On Becoming a Novelist” and “Art of Fiction” by John Gardner as required reading (I would add William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” also, it helped me.)
But most of all, Banis advises, write to suit yourself, in this way you’ll be able to write what you want and sleep well at night…and the hell with what they have to say against you…
A well-worthy book, instructive and filled with memories of people, from Hollywood stars and starlets, to those who wrote for them like Victor Banis, writer extraordinaire…
Janet was a pretty girl who had the ungainly name that could get her in trouble in those years:
Have you got a hardon? Not yet.
Are you gonna get one? You bet!
Who you gonna stick in? Janet.
How’s it gonna come out? All wet.
Sung by the whore house…Quartet…
We would laugh at her as Janet would fume and curse and spit out, “Idiot! Idiot!”
I was in the 8th grade and lusting after every girl in school and out of it. Janet was in another school but this was NYC and even in a building where they lived kids went to school in
opposite directions. Sometimes I saw her come out of her building and head up 2nd Avenue -- I always lusted after her, and I had the notion that she was doing the same.
One morning after jerking off, I walked past her building a little earlier, thinking I’d get her because she was ripe for sticking it in, or so the song did say…I kind of was sure she was the one who had inspired the song…
I entered the lobby -- the building was still sleeping, stretching out as if getting ready to go to work.What to do now? I thought.She has to come down the stairs and there I’d be, looking up her dress with my dick out ready for her mouth to gulp it down.God! Was I hard just thinking about that moment…I pulled my dick out.
Then I heard footsteps, high heeled ones I was sure, maybe with just a toe hold on each little shoe.Oh God, I slowly pulled my dick out and held it before me ready for her to descend the stairs….
A guy appeared at the top of the stairs and I heard him say, “What the fuck?!”
I was out of that building, running down the street as I was zippering up and trying to hold my school bag with the other hand.In no time was I on another street and spent the rest of the school day real pissed at my rotten luck….
I saw Janet a few days after that…I mouthed the song and laughed as she glared at me and disappeared down the street…
Ukrainian Christmas fell on January 7th unlike the American December 25th. It was the old tradition our parents respected and adhered to, but more and more we began to follow the American routine.
Oleksandr had a thing for Sosya. He had gotten her a present, but what? We didn’t know, still we were sure that on Ukrainian Christmas he’d be standing with his gift before him. Needless to say, that Christmas Eve, on the last of a school day, she thought he was jerk and tossed his gift the trash from which Oleksandr retrieved it and skulked away.
It happened like this: January 7th fell on a Friday that year and though we had off from school we still had to show up for Holy Mass that day.It was nice having the rest of the day for gift-giving and family visiting. But smirkingly, we all had our eyes peeled for Oleksandr and Sosya.
Sosya was already there, sitting patiently in the girl’s section, when Oleksandr walked in and trod to the boy’s section in church. Their pews were filled with students and mass begun, was celebrated, and came to an end. Everybody was getting up and leaving the church when Oleksandr’s voice rang out, “Xryctoc razdayetsha!” Christ is born!
People stopped in their place and looked at each other, then smiled, greeted each other and went on with what they were doing. But Oleksandr did not wait for Sosya, he disappeared in the crowd of people leaving the church.
Weird, but Oleksandr left Sosya alone after that, not buying her gifts anymore.
Sonia was a fat girl whom everyone made fun off, how she dressed, how she walked, how she ran….
I don’t know how she got me hard but the possibility she could be the one made me gentler in my approach to her. I stopped laughing at her and actually began to be somewhat defensive when the guys started taunting her, which of course turned the laughter onto me.
“Hey Kolya”, they’d taunt, “Your girl friend is looking for you!” as their smirking and hooting began to make me feel embarrassed and mad at them.
“Fuck you!” I’d spit out defensively to get away from their insults, which I’m certain Sonia was seeing too.
One day, after the usual name calling I was getting from my so-called friends, I turned the corner on Avenue A and there was Sonia standing in a doorway of a building and looking at me; I knew it wasn’t her home -- she lived a few more blocks by the river -- and I turned red from seeing her.
“What’s your game, mister?” she said, frowning at me. “Why are you so nice?”
I suppose after all these weeks I answered, “I don’t know, I guess I like you.” And again I blushed and felt very uncomfortable.
Her glaring face lightened and she faintly smiled at me. And for a moment we liked each other and I smiled back…when I saw her eyes look over my head and again she frowned.
“Idiot jerk!” she spat out. “Get away from me! Stop following me!”
I heard laughter and spun around to see a few of my old friends laughing.
“Hey, Kolya, you like fatsos, don’t you?” they’d laugh. “Let’s see if she can lay down next to you? Hell, she can’t even stand up!”
But by then Sonia had stormed off as the laughter echoed after her but I wonder if for a moment before they appeared Sonia wouldn’t take a chance and get friendly with me…aw, hell I’ll never know….
Vinnie lived in the neighborhood and it was clear what he was, a fag, that the kids taunted and made fun of him as he skipped by on the streets. But the taunting was good natured and it was interesting how red and embarrassed I’d turn as we all called after him “Faggot!” then run away down the street, laughing and teasing each other to go back to him.
Vinnie was a hairdresser who ran his business from his apartment, just one flight up the stairs. Many older women paid him a call and his place was always packed with women gossiping and waiting their turns to get preened over.
I had heard he’d pay an easy five bucks for just sitting there as he’d blow you but I never knew a guy who did that; at least no one admitted that they did it. I sure was glad that no one saw how hard I had gotten, as they’d laugh and smirk over how much money Vinnie would give them.
Hell, but five dollars? I said to myself, intrigued over the easy money I could get. I wasn’t getting that nowhere else, that’s for sure.
I knew Vinnie took off on Saturday afternoons -- learned this from the guys -- so at 3pm I was standing in the outside doorway next to his, watching a woman leave his house; I knew that this was a customer, her hair was expertly made up that it looked like she was going out for the night, dancing and drinking…or something, but defiantly screwing..
I smoked two more cigarettes -- that should have given him enough time -- and entered his building.
The smell of perfume and hairspray was prevalent with each step I took up and neared his door. But the smell of women who had been there made my approach more enticing and alluring. My dick was hard and eager and if I just concentrated on that, how women smell, I’m sure I would let him suck and kiss me all night long, as long as my eyes would be kept closed. If I can’t see what he’s doing than it ain’t happening, right?
I listened; faint music hummed through the door which only added to the sexual tension I was feeling. I gently knocked on the door, waited an instant then knocked again, louder and firmer. I heard gentle footsteps shuffling to the door -- I thought of things feminine. The door opened…
Vinnie stood in a robe; his face creamed and adorned with makeup, something I had never seen a man in before and for a moment was surprised.
“Oh, my,” he said, all flustered. “But I can’t do you now, sweetie,” looking me up and down, but he gushed, “I’m waiting for my beau.” And he winked at me. “Come back another time, sweetie, like tomorrow, late afternoon.”
There was nothing to do but shrug and turn around and head back down…
But I still recall the scent of perfumes that were prevalent through the hall as I passed through the door and went back outside…
