Sam D'Allesandro

in which I admit I'm a Sontag

My first year in Chicago, or rather my first year of grad school, since I don’t know if it was the calendar year 2011 or 2012 (academics and maybe in my case exacademics have the awful tick of saying ‘calendar year’ as if we were counting time by the reign of some first, current, or last—sleeping!—emperor while the undegreed moronic multitude tells the secular year) I often bought books at a grungy second-hand shop in Edgewater. My ex and I got our furniture there too—a threadbare, massive couch, a folding table, the basic accoutrements of our busted-up mutual bachelorhood—until we got bedbugs (in the final, grim calendrical-academic year of living together).

The only book I remember is Sam D’Allesandro’s The Zombie Pit, his debut collection of gay fiction from the late 80s—shortly before his death from AIDS. If you click the link you can see why the cover was memorable: the book is peculiarly square-shaped, white-and-pink, with D’Allesandro looking very handsome and very 80s on the cover (he claimed to have been the son of Joe D’Allesandro, Andy Warhol’s hustler muse; he wasn’t).

It was memorable moreover because some woman—a poor fag hag—had written a long, embarrassing note to her gay friend on the inside cover, talking about how one of the stories (about the embarrassingly over-closeness of a gay man and female friend) reminded her of herself and her male, presumably gay, addressee (I was at a gay wedding last year in which the childhood best friend, female, of one of the grooms gave a toast to him and his betrothed so heartbreakingly happy-pained it was obvious that she’d suffered s and was still suffering from being in love with him [notably she didn’t have a plus-one]).

Maybe I’d remember it twelve years later for those reasons alone (this guy’s hot, that girl’s cringe). It certainly didn’t fit into my memory for the sort of sociology-of-literature reasons it might now, hooking into known networks of literary circulation. D’Allesandro was, I know now, part of the ‘New Narrative’ world in 80s California, something of which I’m aware of these days because a couple of writer-friends are its descendants or recipients of its influence (they do not find funny my line ‘I liked the old narrative’).

I’m glad I didn’t know what NN was. One of the friends descended from it recently said of another bit of literature that he liked it because it had “the familiar features of the avant-garde: flat prose with a few tell-tale quirks blithely relating outrageous content.” I feel like once you can describe the tricks in that way (like Debbie Reynolds making fun of Meryl Streep on Larry King), you’ve got to move on—at least that’s why I stopped writing academic articles once I could see how the thing was done (a little apparently counter-intuitive move here, a bit of ass-kissing in the footnotes there. Yuck! The world doesn’t owe me novelty anymore than it owes me a living, but I can at least keep up a feeling of newness by not knowing what I’m doing, and doing something else when I suspect I might know).

And as I’ve been learning recently, ‘New Narrative’ was a very gay thing. It was named by George Stambolian, the French lit professor who did pioneering work on gay themes in the French canon, but also contributed to Christopher Street interviews with a range of fetishists and put together the short-story anthology series Men on Men. Its two most prominent figures were Dennis Cooper and Robert Gluck (neither of whose work I know well—Cooper always put me off because of the murder-porn edgelord thing, but recently I read his early book of poems Idols,[1] and it’s full of tender-horny-sad stuff that deserves to be better known [although I have no idea what is well known! Maybe everyone knew what New Narrative is except me until recently, and everyone knows Dennis Cooper is a closet tenderqueer. As Sontag says in that interview everyone is watching again these days, ‘Now I wouldn’t know that, would I? You’d be surprised at the number of things I don’t know!’ at which point she ought to have stopped but couldn’t help going on ‘I know so many other things and I’m reading all the time’—I am, reader, I must admit, if it wasn’t apparent, a Sontag!]).

Now D’Allesandro would be placeable, but at the time he wasn’t. The style—self-consciously straightforward, direct and simple—was new to me (and is obviously still foreign to my own recursive, jumbling, shouting way). And it was new to hear someone who was so obviously a particular kind of bottom, the kind I am, talking, through the thinnest of fictions (the fiction, as it were, that this is fiction) about what it’s like to be one. It was horrifying to think that such a person, being one, died of AIDS at 31 (which even at 23 seemed ‘young’—now my own 31 is back over the other side of Covid). I suppose I would have too, or rather whenever I thought about AIDS in those days (not that I did often—I have tried not to think or read about that era, and only recently am reading into it). Of course I know gay people who didn’t—all the old gays at my episcopal church—but it seems both generally unseemly and probably specifically-personally false to abstract myself into the number of survivors.

I assume this is what would happen to me in any historical tragedy—and what I’ll do in any sort of The Road apocalypse, since I’m now too old (but still thin enough!) to be a warlord’s concubine—that is, I’d just die. The end of Grapes of Wrath (how strange to think that as an early teen I loved Steinbeck and assumed he was very important—when I’ve never heard anyone bring him up at a party or conference or somesuch as an adult) where what-his-face Joad says ‘wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, etc etc, I’ll be there’, in a vision of solidarity that means electing to be with the oppressed (‘which side are you on?’). Well, that’s noble, or socialism, or whatever, but I think I wouldn’t even need to choose martyrdom, I’ll just get killed along the way, as the oppression to which some righteous person is racing to be in solidarity—or more like as a loathsome enemy of the good. Wherever there’s a faggot, it’ll turn out to be me.

D'Allesando published about a dozen stories, a few of them good all the way through, most of them sort of uneven (he also has a quite bad earlier collection of poetry Slippery Sins).[2] Reading back through them, the passages that I remember are the ones that still speak to me—the erotic stuff, which is all about somehow getting lost in the desire of the other person, having, if not an experience of self-shattering, one of self-scattering or self-suspension (how different, by the way, would queer theory have been if people like Bersani and Sedgwick in the 80s were writing about D’Allesandro and Cooper—or Holleran and Fero!—instead of Genet, Gide, Proust, Freud, Nietzsche. A project for someone other than me, I suppose, will be writing Why is Queer Theory French? Or indeed why is Theory French/German? Why didn’t American academics of the last half century take up their own domestic canon, both the prize-winning best-sellers like Steinbeck and the communities of ‘radicals’ [in the sense of avant-garde or identitarian] from the Black Mountain to New Narrative to the Violet Quill? I say this of course as a matter of self-critique; it’s only now, leaving Europe and academia, that I’ve begun either to read this stuff or to think about why it hasn’t been what American Theory has been thinking), sometimes with the intensity of a break, something with a gentler drift out of the self and into some pattern of interaction that’s neither quite self nor other.

Sex is so strange in that in can be a way of affirming my self-image and my power to fascinate, but also a way of playing out a breaking of that idol, which of course is always returned to me, but possibly with a difference—a way of likewise playing with worshipping and defiling the other person’s image-self, or of feeling like an extension of him, absorbed in his pleasure or in his pleasure in my pleasure, or of rubbing away the boundaries between us, or of just not being anyone for a moment.

Well rather than me go on about sex, here’s some D’Allesandro:

******

From Nothing Ever Just Disappears:

In his apartment I always became very relaxed. I didn’t do a lot of thinking there. When I entered, I stopped making plans, noting the little disappointments and triumphs of the day. Sometimes I would walk around the room while he was shaving or when I was there alone and just look at things I had seen before. The things that were scattered looked good wherever they had fallen anyway: books (serious books), magazines (frivolous magazines), canvases, cups, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, shoes and pens and brushes and tablets—a generally more attractive class of scatter than I found in many places of similar disorganization. The living room had good light. The bedroom had curtains covered with layers and layers of thick paint, so that they resembled something out of The Flintstones where all the furniture is made of stone, even something seemingly pliable, like curtains. It made the bedroom seem like a cave. Artists do a lot of things like that.

In some ways being there was like taking a nap. It was a pleasant experience, even though elsewhere I would have been bored. It was not uncommon, at times, for us both to sit in silence—smoking—as if just being in the same room was as fine a way of visiting as another. But of course it wasn’t always this way.

When I was with him I did a lot of sliding through the environments I found myself in: slipping through the air, exploring without paying much attention, sitting as if waiting but without thought of what. Something more than hanging out but less than participating—that’s what I was doing or not doing, that’s what was happening to me. And because this happened around him, it all seemed interesting.

****

From Electrical Type of Thing

I needed more of something. Self-awareness had become pretty vapid. Everything seemed too neat. I didn’t want to be dirty, exactly, but I didn’t want to shave every day either. I didn’t want to get hurt exactly, but I liked sex rough. I needed someone who could satisfy urges I couldn’t even name. Someone complicated enough to be exciting, primal enough to be effective.

Someone who helps you to a subhuman state—no language, no questions, no problems—just a pulsing, quivering slab of sensation. People would pay a guru to do that. I’d rather be fucked by Chris.

****

From Giovanni’s Apartment [what a terrible title!]

I know one thing he doesn’t want—the me I appear to be to my friends. He wants a different me, naked and sweating and out of control. And that’s exactly what I needed. Even I know that now.

Still walking, I watch the comparatively tiny practical portion of me tell the romantic side of me to shut up since it doesn’t even know the guy. The pickup was that unremarkable. I was easy, but I had to be. I was a lonely, horny walking bundle of need. I probably left a trail of the stuff on the sidewalk behind me like a snail slick. And everything about him worked: big enough, dark enough, demanding enough. There was no choice involved.

A month later he’s everything. Everything about him is too good: the body, the apartment, the silence. The calm he puts inside of me like one long continuation of the feeling I had sinking into his mattress that first night.

****

Walking to the Ocean This Morning

The truth of the matter is I like to be beaten and then fucked like a dog. I don’t just mean on my hands and knees. I mean hard and carelessly. I want someone relentless. When I was with Tom, before, saying no in the morning could easily be followed with a slap in the face and spanking so hard it would send me crawling from room to room looking for escape in fear of even being touched on my burning ass, until he would decide to catch me and fuck me roughly on the floor. I’d start out whimpering and end up moaning within minutes. Once he had me in that place, he liked to threaten to stop just to hear me beg him not to. Tom loved to create situations that would turn totally into the opposite of what I thought I wanted at the moment, from saying I didn’t want to have sex that morning to begging him not to stop fucking my spanked ass. He didn’t force me to do anything. He just created situations in which I wanted what he was going to give me anyway. Sometimes he’d fuck me real hard and then pull out, holding my legs straight up in the air in a flying V, looking at my enlarged asshole sucking air to fill the vacancy, begging for his cock to return. I loved being so vulnerable. I loved it when my cock or my asshole would destroy my ego with their needs.

---

[1] Some examples:

From Jeff and Steve to Each Other

When he kisses
Jeff’s bicep

he knows what

put it there.

When Jeff noses

in Steve’s armpit

he thinks of their shirts sweated through…

One holds the other:

wild young boys,

tired old guys

the men inbetween.

---

The School Wimp

In high school

I lived against walls

hushed in dope deals.

My friends: my victims

moped around me,

like a weak species.

He used to stand out

like a girl thrown

into our locker room,

a slim novel pressed

to his ribs, horn rim

ships docked at his eyes.

I floated above him,

a prize for cute babes

who shared the

dagwood of my wallet.

Their small pink pouts

opened for chicken feed.

In college, I learned

I could read.

One by one I found

the books he’d pored over;

Mallarme, Colette, Oscar Wilde.

All my friends looked like him.

Then, after eight years

I see him in a bar.

But now his sort attracts me

and later, when the sun

peers into his home,

my hard cock pokes through

his smile like a cigar.

---

Dead Dog

The children want to bury the

body in our rose garden beside

their fortress, and they want a

young oak to plant upon it where

they will build a tree house

named after him, Abbey—king of

one year of their lives. He was

their drunkenness and drugs, the

blind spot in their eyes, running

in from the bus stop calling his

name until he would lose his mind,

Now they lug him, fall down, shriek

because he got as close to their

mouths as a kiss, then give up,

leave him halfway there and run off,

their hands clawing the television,

stereo, hungry to fill up their

wild lives. Not with a dead

dog but with something great.

---

[2] But here are some parts I liked:

From Our House

… we don’t know how, yet still

if we live we live on each other.

Together we are free of freedom’s bother…

Stealing each other’s sleep

as though safety to wrap in

if I scream in the dark

you think you’ve had a nightmare,

unzip my back and climb inside…

Evenings I rattle in clattering.

It’s the day all rolling around inside.

Mornings: steam leaves the kettle,

your key catches in the lock,

and the sound of the street comes in.

---

from After Being Wanted

The sound of water in the hall bathroom

is clear as you wash away

my imprint.

Almost anonymous footsteps

quietly find their way out.

Alone, moments

after being wanted

I sit and smoke in the wrinkled bed