performance
Bryan D. Price
There is a picture of him. He’s wearing a western style shirt with no pants or underpants. In other words, nude from the waist down. I don’t know why he let them take it or why he let them put it out there. His testicles are bigger than his penis and that would embarrass me but nothing embarrassed him. Even though the cock and balls are visible that’s not what the eye is drawn to. He knew how to take a picture. He had a beautiful face. No, beautiful isn’t the right word (it’s almost never the right word). His face wasn’t beautiful it was something else. Tragic, yes, but something other than that. It demanded to be looked at, he knew how to look at you and by extension, the camera. By you I mean whoever he was with. Not you through the camera but you in his presence. Across a table for instance or seated next to him at a bar. What do you want to know, he’d ask. Why the fuck are we here? He was very direct. Taciturn, but direct. I preferred subtlety, you know, languidness. Encircling a subject gently and then, finally, after some chit chat, getting down to brass tacks, so to speak. Or else he’d just stare at you. Not as if he wanted to kill or eat you, but as if he wanted you to look away, but it was impossible. It wasn’t as if I was a stranger. He treated everyone like that. He had a great deal of self-regard, not that it was undeserved but he knew how to carry himself, even before anyone knew who he was. That is something I never learned or was never entitled to. How we got to be friendly, if that’s even the right word, is a mystery beyond my understanding. We lived for a while in the
same apartment, on 24th street right off of Mission. This was before he published A Difficult Life. He was writing it though—I watched him. He wrote it longhand on yellow legal pads. I always thought that was just a myth—people writing longhand on yellow legal pads—but there he was at the kitchen table most mornings, writing. If you’ve read it, you know it’s unclassifiable. Is it poetry? Is it prose? It’s not prose poetry, but it has that hypnotic quality, as if it all came to him in a dream and he sat down and wrote it in one take. When one reads A Difficult Life, it seems obvious that the writer is learned, the writing is almost esoteric in its knowledge of the world and its secret meanings, of people, their feelings and what lies beyond their feelings. I could never square that with the man in real life (or at least my memory of him in those days). He was so, I guess the most charitable way to put it is, childlike. And his second work, A Drug Addict Repents—I had no idea how he gained such on-the-ground knowledge of places like Casablanca and Barcelona and Nantes. These were things we never talked about. I didn’t have the courage to ask him, how do you know all of this. Where does this come from? Can you teach me? That’s what I really wanted to ask, but I don’t think I could have been taught. It doesn’t work that way.
The apartment I took in that flat was small. It must have been a dining room at one time—it was just off the kitchen and had a built-in sideboard, which is where I kept all my books. I set up a little stereo and had a bed. That was it, really. Eventually I took a chair from the kitchen and used the built-in for a desk, but there was no place for my knees. Anyway, I have a romantic attachment to those days, or perhaps the right word is circumstances. Billy— he went by Billy then—would ask me if I wanted to take a walk and we’d go for miles, usually to North Beach. Up Mission and then over to South Van Ness and then up Van Ness to Sutter or Bush and then cut through lower Nob Hill. He liked to ride the
elevators at the Fairmont (as I said, he was childlike in those days). They were glass and you could see the whole city. He knew where to score drugs in Chinatown and it took me some time to realize that that specific endeavor was at the heart of these walks. He’d give me a pill or two of Vicodin or Percocet and then put his finger conspiratorially to his mouth. Sometimes he’d take me to a Filipino bar where he knew the bartenders and we’d drink for free. He had that quality of being at home anywhere. He was never out of place. That’s another way of being that I couldn’t replicate. I’m too self-conscious, too aware of my surroundings. I notice people noticing me, sizing me up, deciding whether or not I belong. He didn’t say much. He might look at the sex shops on Columbus Street or Washington Square Park and say, this was all better in the seventies, though he had no way of knowing (at least not from experience). He was superstitious and always liked to stop at the same liquor store that was built according to a triangular floor plan and buy Player’s Navy-Cut cigarettes. We’d smoke them on our walk back and sometimes we’d stop off at the Roxy to see an old movie. He was not discerning in any way about movies. He’d look up at the showtimes and say, it’s starting now, let’s go in. He didn’t really care what it was. We spent a lot of time this way but I never learned much about him. Sometimes though, out of the blue, he’d point out places he’d lived—hostels, the YMCA building, SROs. We’d walk for hours and it seemed as if the only way he could say anything about himself was through commentary on the objective or outer world. His history, or at least a part of it, seemed to be mapped onto the city.
At some point though everything ends and it ended for us when he went to Seattle. He met a woman (or girl) named Hailey something or other and they went up there together. He wasn’t the type to offer a proper farewell and I never saw him again. Though I did try to follow his exploits as best I could. There was something
about myself that I had invested in him. I’m not sure if that’s the right way of putting it, but, for instance, when I bought my copies of A Difficult Life and A Drug Addict Repents, I read them looking for myself in those pages, visions of how I may have rubbed off on him. Or maybe even avatars of me—a character who spoke or looked like me—but there was no sign of anything like that. I thought that, in a different life or if I was wired slightly differently, I could have been him or someone like him. I often thought about my capacity to court danger, to live in the moment (pardon the cliché), to take risks—personal as well as artistic ones. What if I had given myself to some more antic, artistic spirit? What if I posed nude for someone or was willing to give myself to someone I knew would exploit me, perhaps even kill me? These are the questions I asked myself (and many more like them) as I thought about Billy, or more precisely my connection to him. As much as I feel like he was a cipher, he did take me into his confidence and it felt as if that was the closest I would ever come to power, true power. Not political or economic power but something far greater, something closer to mythical power or the power of the gods to destroy or alienate or bring about or elicit the feeling we call love.
For a while (when his books were being released) I could trace his ascendence through interviews and features and reviews. I would scour the early internet and read everything I could get ahold of. I’d go to newsstands (when there was still such a thing) and flip through obscure literary magazines looking for some sign of him. It frustrated me that he never came back to do a reading. He read in Portland, in Chicago, in New York and Montreal. He read in Mexico City and London, in Lisbon and Miami. But he never came back to the scene of the crime or his memory or the place that must have (at least in part) fueled his glorious (if degraded) visions. And then he stopped writing. He disappeared and became shrouded in mystery and that mystery fueled a
whole new cycle of stories. He was spotted (apparently) in Lagos, in Nairobi, in Benin. He was, as one rumor went, working on a screenplay for A Drug Addict Repents in Rome, in Mérida. Another had him in Copenhagen, in Christiania working on a history of anarchic utopias. The longer he remained silent and out of the public eye, to a point at least, the more his stature grew as one of those artists who up and walked away from his powers.
And then I got a long email from him, which caught me off guard. I was just beginning to use it (email). I never asked him how he got my email address and he never offered that information up. He was in Berlin, Kreuzberg (which made all the sense in the world). He had met a woman named Jeanine who was a filmmaker and they were making what he called “guerilla” films. He was her muse, he said, and she was pregnant with their first child. She concocted all kinds of dangerous scenarios for him to endure (beatings, bloodlettings, death defying feats of courage and derring-do) and she filmed them from afar or surreptitiously. Sometimes they’d make films indoors, just the two of them. Some may find them pornographic, he warned, but he assured me that they weren’t made in such a spirit. Writing, he said, was too passive. He didn’t like the idea of presenting himself in retrospect, which gave him time to think, to shape, to sculpt, to lie. It was a fraud, he said, writing. He valued the immediacy of film, the way the camera read the subject in a way that bounded it, tied it up to be looked at or scrutinized, sometimes against its will.
As I read the email, I realized that the person who I walked with, the childlike Billy, was an act or persona and the writer (the learned person) was real. But then, I thought, each was a persona, none more real than the other. There was the childlike walker going to buy drugs in Chinatown and ride the Fairmont hotel elevators, there was the writer of sophisticated if depraved books, and then there was this deeply self-reflective actor who wanted
to kill himself on camera. Cameras, he said, were exquisite. He liked to touch and hold them. They reminded him of guns. When he was a child, he said, he was obsessed with guns—toy guns, replicas, real guns, it didn’t matter. He loved to touch and hold them, the heavier and more real the better, of course. It was the same, he said, with Jeanine’s Bolex. Each, he said, had the power to destroy, to annihilate.
Because the voice was so oddly calibrated, so different, so self-possessed in a way that was at odds with who I knew in San Francisco, I thought to myself that this might be a hoax or a hallucination on my part, a lucid dream. But then a few weeks later I received a package in the mail. It was a VHS tape. Someone wrote on the spine, The Augustine Trilogy. I immediately slipped the tape into my VCR to watch it. It is hard to say what I thought of them—those short films. There were three, hence the title, they were called The Sacral, The Eternal, and The Carnal. They were each rife with religious symbolism (perhaps overly so) and various types of ritual. There were altars in the forest and still images that operated as tableaux. Various women designed to remind the viewer of the Madonna or Joan of Arc, often holding knives. And there were animals. A baby deer, a mule, a dead hawk, insects in filth. He would wear their feathers, their skin, and covered himself in what looked or seemed to be their blood. The films were violent, sometimes baroquely so, and at various points difficult to watch. Billy (or the character he plays) dies at the end of each one, stabbed in the first, drowned in the second, and then dead in bed after a bout of lovemaking in the third. The parts I enjoyed the most could be called interstitial—leaves vibrating in the wind, a birch forest, footage of the countryside shot from the passenger side of a moving car, the city at night glimpsed from a bedroom window.
I wrote him a short letter congratulating him on his newfound passion and he did not respond. Years passed. I read the
BRYAN D. PRICE
occasional story online in English about Jeanine and her films, but there was never any mention of Billy or of The Augustine Trilogy I thought that maybe, because of his fame (or former fame) he would merit an allusion or an aside. By that time though, his works were being seen in a different light. I wouldn’t say there was a backlash, they just didn’t seem to elicit the same kind of praise. It was as if his disappearance, which had once enhanced his stature and that of his work, had stretched on for too long and now seemed to detract from it. Those books were seen as old hat or representations of a bygone era that people had grown embarrassed of. I myself hadn’t read them in years so one day, feeling nostalgic or melancholy I pulled them off the shelf and spent a few hours going over them. They seemed just as vital and tortured and incisive as I remembered them, maybe even more so. Aesthetics though run in circles or cycles and he was down while all manner of new stuff that I didn’t care for was up. At some point when I was down in the dumps about something or other—a breakup or extended period of loneliness—I got the tremendous urge to write him a letter. On paper, an old fashioned letter. I got my computer out to compose it and then copied it onto stationary I had bought. I put everything in it, my memories of us and also the disaster of my present life, all my disappointments and regrets. It wasn’t at all cohesive and in hindsight, I probably should have held a little back. I gave him my phone number in hopes of a conversation, but it never happened. I was wounded but not surprised. We are not taught to respect male friendships such as these. But then, a few years later (2019, I think) he sent me a letter. It was much shorter than mine, and concise. He had cirrhosis of the liver and was dying from it. There was nothing to be ashamed of he said. I don’t know if it was a false front, but he said, it’s what Billie Holiday died from and he was happy to be in her company. There was also a photograph. It was of him in
a hospital bed surrounded by his family—Jeanine and their two children, Denis and Sylvia. At some point, he wrote, he decided to devote himself to raising their children, to keeping a good house and a plentiful if ragged garden. He wasn’t perfect, but he assured me he had had a good run. There was something poignant about that picture he included. He is sitting up in his hospital bed, looking much older than a man in his fifties. His hair is long and he wears a headband. He is smiling. His family is smiling. I don’t know why they’re smiling. That’s not true, I do know why: the camera demands it. But I don’t think I’d have the will to conjure up such a smile on my deathbed. And then it struck me that what I was looking at was a Polaroid, which is to say a singular image, not a copy of a negative, and therefore possibly meant for me and me alone. I thought about that for a long while. What is lost sometimes, in terms of fidelity, is gained in singularity.
The last thing he said was that he had a daughter in the U.S. who he wanted me to get ahold of. Her last known address was in Olympia, Washington. He had been too afraid to contact her and now, in his state, he didn’t want to put her through the agony of watching him die. He wanted me to tell her everything I knew about him. His final words to me were, be as honest as possible, I trust that you knew me. I composed another long letter. Her name was Marie. The letter I composed to Marie had to do with a question he had asked me once and I never forgot it. I guess I was using it as a framing device, a narrative attempt to defend or even absolve him in the eyes of this person who he had abandoned. The question went something like, can it still be called a performance if there is no audience? He asked it of me absentmindedly. Or I was in an absentminded state as I received it. I was lying in bed and he was thumbing through one of my books. I didn’t take it seriously in the moment. No, I said, or maybe. I didn’t know what he meant then. He was always saying cryptic-sounding things
like that. I have thought about it though in the intervening years. Often while driving. Lonely existence enforces such thoughts. It crystallized something about his life, about my life, all of our lives, I guess. It made me doubt the veracity of the most sacred things and yet I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to him or the idea of doing right by him and his memory. I’ve sent the letter to Marie, but so far there’s been no reply.