I decided to do volunteer work as a kind of aide, going to the houses of the old and the sickly in the North Fork. I also painted, read, wrote in my notebooks, and discovered physics. That’s when I started to formulate my theories on emotions and gravity.
Entranced by the tide and inhaling the smells of the Sound, hoping to find Kyle, her atom self, but no … I’ll tell you about that soon enough. That night I first understood the secrets of gravity, and the moon, and embraced the power of my acute sense of smell. My first shrink here, Samuel Sontag, who I nicknamed Count Shockula, thought I just made up these smells. I challenged him, “You don’t deny gravity, do you? Or its effects on the tides? Or on objects as small as atoms? What are smells but molecules floating in the air? And moon tides — gravity determines their motion. And people are seventy percent water, and have smells inside them that are affected by gravity. I call them soulsmells.” He just kept looking down and taking his notes.
After incubating in Orient, I realized I had to leave or become an erased soul inside a physical shape pantomiming the motions of life. Or a lonely oddball wasting away like Art. Dad had told me about the trust Greta and Bickley Sr. set up for me. I decided to attend Parsons in New York. I thought life would be different. It wasn’t. I sport-fucked. Made very few friends. Parsons had a soulsmell of dried blood, moldy cork, and self-absorption.
I went to see all of Greta’s films. I found books about her in the NYU library, which I later learned got so many things wrong. Yes, she left Hollywood after the perfectly titled Two-Faced Woman flopped both artistically and financially, which allowed her studio bosses to use it as a pretext to dump her lovely derriere, and her (to them) inequitable salary. The greed-gods leaked the vilifying “truth” that she’d suffered a nervous and physical breakdown, felt abused by those so magnanimous Hollywood employers. She planned to take one or two years off in New York City and return triumphantly to Hollywood. It wasn’t the war, her desire to be alone, even the movie mongrels that stopped her. It was an affair. Like all of Greta’s affairs, with both men and women, it was clandestine and doomed. Unlike all the others, this time, in 1943, she gave birth to a child. Me. She chose my name: Salome. And then she chose to give me away.
I would go to her apartment and wait outside, and sometimes I saw her come out and get into a car. Or go for a walk. Few people recognized her. I never talked to her.
For almost two years, I floated though my classes and explored the city. Through the recommendation of one of my professors, I found this small gallery. The gay owner loved my “look,” so he gave me my first show, ARTillery. After one of my weekly performances straddling one of the cannons, I met the Great and Powerful Horrwich and he invited me to his opening, and so I flitted into the Murray Gibbon Gallery up on 57th and Fifth. (He soon moved to SoHo and later Chelsea.) We consummated our lust-power attraction that night in the closet of the gallery. Soon after, I moved into his loft on Prince Street. He owned the whole damn building. The industrial plants still reigned like the dying kings of SoHo, unaware of their impending extinction, mighty buildings with soul and the energetic odor of toil and beer-injected muscles.
Horrwich and I became a pair. I all but quit going to Parsons when we got to setting up the Art Is Dead happening. Dad found out what we were planning from Art. When I went to Orient to bring Art into the city, Dad picked me up at the bus. “Salo, I know in your heart you want to help Art. But please, this is wrong. I’m asking you to think about it.” We went to Art’s and I told him what Dad had asked. Art pleaded with him. “Gus, I want this. I need this.” Dad gave up.
A few months after the happening, some of the few friends I made at Parsons threw a nongraduation party for me because I officially quit the school. It happily surprised me when Hilda and Dad arrived. They couldn’t stay angry at me. But damn, did they stand out: Auntie Em and Uncle Henry venturing to the Emerald City. They seemed to be having fun until Horrwich got drunk. He oozed over to me while I was talking to some guy who was hitting on me. Horrwich tugged me away and asked, prosecutor style, “How many other people here have you slept with?”
“None of your business.”
His lips coiled and he smelled jealous. Jealousy has the odor of a steaming iron. He got even drunker and was high on his extract of belladonna, and then, in front of everyone, he picked up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Selected Letters and in his pedant’s voice yelled, “It is such a shame Russell gave up philosophy. Does anyone know why he gave it up?” No one uttered a word. Dad and Hilda looked bewildered. I cringed. Horrwich’s talons were out. I didn’t know how to stop him. “I’ll tell you. Russell said it was because he discovered fucking. Tonight we are celebrating the lovely Salome, who skipped the philosophy and went straight to fucking, and she is damn good at it!” I wanted to laugh. This so-called progressive artist was just another recondite chauvinist.
Dad marched over to Horrwich and punched him in the gut. Without even talking to me, he and Hilda started to leave. I ran up to them and begged them to stay. His eyes told me he despised my slatternly lifestyle. “We are going and you can come with us,” he said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back to that life. I hugged them and whispered, “I love you both, but …”
I went with Horrwich to his loft. After he fucked me, he nodded off. I couldn’t sleep, so I walked over to the window and stared out. Below was a bum leaning against a lamppost — I inhaled his cheap alcohol breath and stale body odor. The streetlight was barely visible through the mist. I watched as he, so carefree, pissed in the gutter. Then I smashed my hand through the glass. Horrwich jumped up. “Salome? What?” I picked up a shard and cut my right cheek. Instead of rushing me to the hospital, Horrwich, still naked, snapped pictures. He said my face looked prismatic with the blood mixing with my tears and circling my jade eyes. He thought it was some kind of art statement. He ended up showing the photos in a gallery and selling them. He didn’t give me a dime.
I finally kicked the camera out of his hand, he got dressed, and we taxied to St. Vincent’s. The ER doctor didn’t call a plastic surgeon and he butchered me. I have this Frankenstein’s monsterish scar under my right eye that stretches for a little more than an inch. It’s fading after all these decades, as I have faded. Still, you must see that I possess powers worth more than youth, beauty, or natural memory. And those deep scars on my hands have not fully faded. They too are memory and memento.
Each morning I exhale the decomposing cells of my face and my body. And time, the human definition of time, that hobgoblin of impending bodydeath, is my earthly enemy. Disintegration has spoiled my external eyesight, and the new surgeries have failed. Everything outside of me appears foggy. My eyes were always so light sensitive. I have always seen, and still do see, the past and the future. Not seeing is humbling and mortifying, but seeing was often more humbling and mortifying. Others have defined me as a visual artist, but really I am a sensation artist, a sensate morphologist — all of my senses, especially smell, are hyperacute. Even now, I can inhale the pulse of the moon.
11 MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Step to the Music (Which He Hears), 1992
I finally catch some z’s, and when I get up I see it’s all green grassy. You know, in Queens, Jack, ’til I was about twelve I thought all parks had blacktop and cement. A park meant basketball and handball courts. I ain’t hip to the notion that most of the world thinks of trees and grass and hills when they hear the word “park.”