New York, that accidental city, whose pleasures vanish sometimes without your ever having known they were there, had, from October 3 to December 3 at the Whitney Museum, a piece of environmental art by Michael McMillen called Inner City: a room-sized reconstruction of three entire blocks of a warehouse district in Los Angeles (it might well have been Manhattan). Large enough to walk around, and even, at one point, through, Inner City was complete with scaled-down neon signs, fire escapes, window shades, and even a squalid little poolroom with metal folding chairs strewn about, cues on the table, and a miniature ceiling fan rotating overhead. Like the rest of Inner City the poolroom was empty; but then, what city isn’t empty, late at night in that part of town?
“It is only by directly experiencing the entire installation,” states McMillen in the museum flyer, “that the position/concept of art as experience [may] be realized.” But what Inner City actually amounts to, I think, is an extraordinary doll’s house. (And a very evocative doll’s house for anyone who has haunted such bleak, decaying blocks in reality.) Consider: surely we would never have come to the purlieus of the Lower West Side but for the fact that they are the hunting grounds of other men looking for a certain style of sex. Who else knows this inner city? The poor, the recently arrived, the Hispanic. How lovingly McMillen has recreated each detail of his urban doll’s house: a hotel hallway, one-thousandth the size of its original, evokes precisely the erotic longing you feel walking home late at night in a run-down neighborhood, when physical loneliness corresponds exactly to psychic isolation, and you think—passing an abandoned truck, an empty lot screened by shrubbery or garbage under an open moon—wouldn’t that be a wonderful place to make love? Just a few doors down from the tiny poolroom is a little bar, its door (no bigger than your thumb) half open; through the door come the sounds of the Village People singing “San Francisco,” and the joyous hooting and screaming of (invisible) people within.
You stand back to gaze at the door, the darkness, the neon sign in the window. You say to yourself, “This is the door, the darkness, the music to which I have been drawn, irresistibly, so many winter nights; this the ruined neighborhood, the lonely street, the crumbling building (its shades drawn or half drawn); this the sordid, deserted, poignant place so many of us have wandered in for years. Look at it: a piece of an old life reconstructed to give you a feeling of distance from what embroils you.”
“I was there last night,” muttered one of two friends at my side.
Women, children, and grandmothers stood beside us, exclaiming over the tiny chairs and cues in the poolroom. (“Harry, why don’t you take this up? You need a hobby.”) Then they moved on, around the corner, in the faint and lurid light. But we three remained rooted; there was no way we were going to leave the little doorway with the music pouring out. We waited (as we had waited so many nights when the Eagle had the best jukebox in town) to hear what song came next. And we looked at the other museum patrons, wondering if they understood, if they felt the peculiar magic of this place, its romantic significance. For this was the bar of the past ten years of our lives. It was Love Among the Ruins.
“Don’t touch!” one mother commanded her daughter, slapping the child’s wrist as she reached out to fondle a tiny fire escape. “Look at the fan, Mom!” cried her son. And the nuclear family bent down to peer into a room where, in real life, young Chicanos or Puerto Ricans would surely cluster around the table, their transistor radio on a windowsill blaring salsa.
You imagine the empty streets of McMillen’s papier-mâché Inner City filled: outside the dark half-open door of this tiny bar should be a tiny man in chains; and ten feet (or, rather, half an inch) away, standing brokenhearted on the corner, another little man, wondering if the man in chains will follow him out of the bar. There should be miniature motorcycles, minute beards, and sweatshirts peeking out of little leather jackets, a minuscule cop car out of which miniature police with flashlights scramble to clear men out of the crevices where they are having sex with one another’s miniature cocks; and a gang of tiny teenage boys waiting for a solitary man to walk by so they can beat him up.
There were no cops or thugs, no bare-chested man lounging in his doorway as you walked past, wondering if he could really be that available; no one slowly masturbated in an upstairs window for all the world to see. But there was one advantage: late winter nights on West Street, passing the lit windows of otherwise deserted buildings, I often wonder what goes on inside and who could, who would, possibly live there; I needed only to peer through the tiny window of McMillen’s Hotel Norton to see the poolroom, the bar. I was huge in relation to the cardboard-and-paint city blocks on the table before me, Gulliver among the Lilliputians, a Jolly Green Giant of a voyeur. I was free of the oppressive gloom I usually felt wandering the streets in real life.
But “San Francisco” is a long song; eventually we took our leave, without ever knowing what followed, and walked away from the Inner City.
❡
“Why do gays love ruins?” I said to my friends when we emerged into the crisp autumn sunlight of a Sunday afternoon. “The Lower West Side, the docks. Why do we love slums so much?”
“One can hardly suck cock on Madison Avenue, darling,” said the alumnus of the Mineshaft, curling his lip as we strolled down that very street: the arrondissement of gentility, so tasteful that coming uptown from his own street was truly traveling into another country. Nannies pushed strollers filled with fortunate heirs; adolescents in blazers, slacks, and Topsiders, young men in Rugby shirts passed by. “If Westway is ever built,” continued my friend, “and the shoreline made pretty by city planners—when the city is totally renovated, when gays have restored all the tenements, garden restaurants have sprouted on the Lower East Side, and the meatpacking district is given over entirely to boutiques and card shops—then we’ll build an island in New York Harbor composed entirely of rotting piers, blocks of collapsed walls, and litter-strewn lots. Ruins become décor, nostalgia for the mud. We all want to escape; you escaped to the city. Would you ever have ended up in the ruins had you not been gay?”
“If I weren’t gay, I don’t think I’d be in the city at all.”
“Especially on a day like this.”
We looked up at the hard blue sky, the brilliant autumn light, and rounded a corner to see the trees along Fifth Avenue already starting to change color.
“Soon New York will be occupied by no one but the rich and the perverted,” observed my friend, and at that moment we spotted a mutual friend who embodied both those traits standing in a worn leather jacket, faded, torn blue jeans, and scuffed engineer boots, hailing a cab.
“There’s a perfect example,” I said. “Why is there that strange axis between the extremely aesthetic”—the man getting into the cab possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of European culture and the history of ormolu—“and the extremely sleazy?”
“God only knows,” sighed my other companion, whose neighborhood this was and who left it only to backpack in Vermont.
“Well,” said my first friend, “ask yourself. Why could Brahms make love only in brothels? Why did Proust, the most sensitive and considerate of men, torture rats with pins? Why did he donate the furniture he inherited from his parents to a male brothel he frequented? What pleasure did he get from seeing a nude trolley-car conductor sitting on the sofa his grandmother had no doubt sat on to do needlepoint? Why did one of his characters, the lesbian daughter of a famous composer, spit on her father’s photograph while making love? Why do we rush out to trick after talking to our mothers on the telephone? Why do we find graduate students from Princeton lying facedown in the Mineshaft?”—here he burst into laughter at some memory of the previous night. “Why our desire to grovel, to wallow in the slime? Why the beauty of those neighborhoods? Why is there a truck without a chassis on the eighth floor of the baths so that people may do the curious thing of going to the baths to make love in a truck (or a jail cell, or a cheap hotel room)? Why the trucks at all? Why did Huck Finn flee Aunt Sally? Why does great politeness produce a strain that often can only be relieved by cruelty? Why did Marie Antoinette play shepherdess? Why do gays wear ripped clothing and congregate in ruins? Why do I feel a strange sense of freedom the moment I enter a decaying neighborhood? Why do I imagine, when I pass a tenement with a collapsed wall on Avenue B, giving a party there—or better yet, conjure up a slender fellow, half hidden by the rusted doorframe, inviting me into the rubble to make love, entirely in ruins?”
“I hate to say this,” said our third friend, “but I don’t know what you mean.”
“Pretentious prig!” we gasped.
❡
And so we entered the sunny glade of Central Park and, watching children play with sailboats, forgot about these questions until later that evening. Just after sunset, we found ourselves drifting inevitably downtown to the very region whose simulacrum we had marveled at that afternoon. The shore, once lined with ships sailing for Le Havre and Cherbourg, was now (but for the new terminal at Forty-second Street) a series of rotting piers and empty lots from which isolated families fished; further south, behind the shattered windows of erstwhile shipping firms, moved silhouettes of men in search of another kind of nourishment. The warehouses, the bars, the cheap hotels pulled us into their shadows, into their peculiar mood. The detachment afforded by art at the Whitney Museum was gone. The bar was life-sized now and stood on a cobblestone corner. We went through the door into its dark room to find a frieze of bearded faces regarding us like stone visages in the jungle: blank, cold, and waiting. Whatever their attraction, whatever their meaning, these ruins were real.
