Pretty Pretty

Pretty is such a loaded word when you are a boy. But I'd go back there in a second.

In the '70s, I did get mistaken for a girl, though my mom has always said my friend Charlie was prettier than me. Pat was "cute." It was an era of androgyny without our really knowing it. Center-parted hair and beads around the neck, and no one's face was fully formed. We all had very shiny long brown hair.

I rather lurched into viability.

There weren't graded paths to it.














This is a candid shot of two hungover people in a dive bar in New Haven some time in the eighties.

Folks commented on my looks, my perceived Midwestern skin. (Whatever it is, it ain't from Ohio. I will cop to Kentucky.) I got told to model so many times that it actually became irritating (because I was too short, so couldn't make a dime), I got asked who cut my hair on Wisconsin Avenue, I got voted best looking in an unofficial poll of the class of 1984, I got photographed by a famous photographer on 57th Street (I threw away my copy because I looked too damn pretty), I got talked to at telephone booths, harassed on the subway, I got cruised by JFK Jr. at the Citibank on Christopher Street, I got followed like a girl.

I got interviewed for a documentary on what it was like to be good looking. They asked me if it had presented advantages.

And I said, "Not enough."

If They Don't, Use a Match

 
1997-2002

Robert's Apartment:16 Jane Street between Greenwich Avenue and West 4^th Street/Eighth Avenue, Buzzer #19 outside, Buzzer #3D inside; Apartment 3D, fourth floor from lobby on right side of building

Linens: Bed linens and towels are in the front closet, closest to bathroom.There is space for your clothes in this closet, also a little hanging space in the main room closet. The laundry bag is in the main room closet.  There are more sheets and pillow cases in the bag if you need them. Take laundry around the corner on Eighth Avenue between Jane and Horatio Streets (right side). Drop it off and they do the laundry. 

Gas and Electric: The oven burners light automatically (if they don't, you can use a match). If you vacuum, you must turn off the air conditioner or you risk blowing a fuse.

Phone: The phone number, as you know, is 212-255-2268. To check voicemail at home, dial 366-5055, enter the password 57868, follow instructions. To check voicemail from outside, dial 366-5055, enter #212-255-2268, enter the password 57868, follow instructions.

Internet: To access the internet, turn on the computer. After it has completely booted up, double-click on the “Shortcut to bway.net” icon. Click on the “connect” button. It will dial up automatically. Then double-click on the “Internet Explorer” icon. You will have an online screen.

Stereo and TV: For the stereo, such as it is, hit the JVC amplifier button on the upper left side. Put a CD in the portable CD player and hit the play button. The volume control is on the upper right side. For the TV, use the “Electronics” remote ― the one that isn’t the Sony or Panasonic remote.  This changes the channel.  To adjust the volume, use the Sony remote. To use the VCR, use the Panasonic remote.

Bicycle: The tires need air.  You can fill them at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 15^th Street bicycle shop.  There is no lock ― I just use it for recreation (hah).

Stronger Than Pride

 

I won't pretend that I intend to stop living.

You look back at what you were playing on your boom box and some of it seems more decent than the rest. I was pretty keen on Sade, despite my cool intentions, on Avenue B and then on 10th Street at Seventh Avenue.  That apartment with the skylights and the smell of saltwater, that peculiar place at the center of not-desirable New York City.  There was a crackhouse in the garage across the street (before it became a Gourmet Garage).  There was a homeless lady who lived in an INDENTATION.  There was an old-school gay guy charging too much as a barber downstairs, cowboy boots and dyed blonde hair. There was a lampshade shop that I just cannot explain.

Julius was on the corner, Three Lives across the street, acclaimed authors and porn stars winking at me with abandon as they raced by.

Everyone on deadline.

I'd go up to the roof with Cammie, Lisa, Dirk and tricks. For Sade, tar-beach sunbathing and Pimm's. This was a big song that summer, me running hard downtown to the WTC and riding a steamy subway uptown to Cafe Luxembourg. Somewhere along the way I developed a crush on this guy, Mark, who was enamored of my Bohemian (cough cough) way of life.  He would drop by the bar and, as you do, enroll at Columbia.

I still really really love you
love is stronger than pride

Hotel Motel Holiday Inn

I stayed here once, rather unhappy, but the view was truly stellar

I have always been a fool for hotels. Hotels in the abstract, hotels as an idea of an exciting life, hotels just to be away, the anonymity of random Ritz-Carltons in Pasadena and the gravity of the iconic Ritz on the Place Vendôme.  These are all places that figure large in my memory:

The Waldorf, where we were expelled onto a December sidewalk in our pajamas, Nixon coming. Wrapped in furs by Waldorf women and captured on the eleven-o'clock news.

The Boar's Head Inn, site of the annual Barr Kid Pro-Am Diving Competition in a cloistered swimming pool.

Carr's in Gatlinburg with the ever-present temptation to sneak into an elaborate lagoon-style pool next door, featuring a slide through a tunnel in a stage-set rocky cliff.

The Hotel de Nevers Luxembourg, where I lived the entire summer of 1984 for $7 a night, plus an additional 8 FF ($1) to prends une douche, washing my clothes with Woolite in a small sink until I met Agnès,whose mother insisted on doing my laundry in Velizy. Now that's a fun true sentence. Here is another: She ironed my Brooks Brothers boxer shorts. And people say the French aren't friendly...

Chateau Marmont, where I went for business within a week of my father's death, ordered room service club sandwiches and slept extensively. My room was at the back, facing the hill, and was oh so quiet. When I hear the word "peaceful" I always think of the Chateau Marmont.

In the era of the boutique hotel, roughly 1998 to today, I've stayed in a converted office building on the Passeig de Gràcia, a converted water tower in Cologne, a converted something-or-other in East Berlin, a windowless room like a train car in Rome, a nearly windowless room with a whole lotta Phillipe Starck fabric in Paris, One Aldwych in London with the incredibly loud, ostensibly ecological plumbing, and that nice little Hotel Indigo in Asheville with the fantastic view of the mountains and the Grove Park Inn, calling to me like a siren.

Tomorrow I start a new gig writing for Kimpton Hotels, and can't help but feel that my whole life has led me here, to this moment of punching pillows, sniffing soaps and fumbling for fresh ways to communicate the buzzing nature of a well conceived lobby.

I can't wait to dive in.

Purple Noon: Damn It, Matthew!

Just last week I made a lot of people who were not predisposed to love it watch The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Eventually they were rapt, because it is such a very good old-fashioned movie, in all its unsubtlety.

The chief asset of the film and the story as constructed is simple:  Tom Ripley is gay.

That's not strikingly clear in the Patricia Highsmith novel and is only tantalizing in (the brilliant in its own way) Purple Noon.  But here Tom is gay and the story is so much the better for it. You'd assume that Anthony Minghella (doing his best work) and Matt Damon (doing his best work) worked it out together.  But maybe not.

Damon's on a run that seems aimed at proving his ostensible liberal middle class Boston boy personality is a charm offensive shielding dumbass jock attitudes about race and sexuality circa 2015.

#gaylimebathingsuit

If Weathermen Were Better

It’s so beautiful I can’t think.  Only walking and looking and listening to music make sense, and yet not enough sense to convey what is happening in Alexandria now.  If weathermen were better, I’d plan my year around a single day like this and use it perfectly. I’d hire a personal chef to serve me espresso and sublime scrambled eggs in the shade of a tree and I’d read something droll there.  Droll and old-fashioned and spirit-lifting: the opposite of the news.

I would play tennis, and my forehand would hit the corners and I would barely break a sweat.

I’d meet you for lunch at that French place in Georgetown I just read about, and then we’d walk by the water.  No, much better than that: We’d drive up to Great Falls, Maryland side, and I would do something I haven’t done since I was 25: jump off a cliff into the Potomac.  You should jump too.

My chef is also my driver, and he’ll take us anywhere we want to go.  We should want to go to Annapolis or Middleburg, but we don’t.  We should want to look at art but we don’t.  (For one thing, there’s no such thing as indoors today.)  Instead I want to show you a couple of places that haven’t changed since 1982.  I can’t show you Mr. Henry’s or Au Pied de Cochon, but I can buy you a drink at Martin’s – outdoor table, please.  I can show you Dumbarton Oaks and Meridian Hill and the route I used to run along Rock Creek Parkway, with a loop through the zoo. 

I can show you the marina where Dad kept his boat and I played in the caterpillar tree.

But I’m not thinking big enough.  My chef/driver is a class-A sailor and ready to take us on a dusk sprint past monuments.  I’ve got two bottles of wine, a tremendously expensive Chablis and a $12 bottle of Salice Salentino.  France and Italy past the Kennedy Center and Lauinger Library, where it used to be that the best view was in the smoking lounge that was blown off, so to speak, for the benches by the reading room.  We looked inward rather than outwards at the wider world; we weren't yet 21.

There was always an end of summer day like this in Washington, and always an end of summer day like this in New York.  One of these days fell on the eleventh, when my friend Michou called from Amsterdam, waking me up and telling me to turn on the TV.  For three or four or five days, all the days were as beautiful as this, but I had to show identification to come back to my apartment on Jane Street.

If, by chance, I had wandered away to the river or met a friend for a glass of wine or taken a a German guy who couldn’t get back home to Nora’s show at Fez.

Good lord, Robert:  Stop writing!  Go out!  Or just keep the door flung open.

Fall Book Preview: The First Five

In the spirit of New York Magazine, The New York Times and all enthusiastic list-makers Pro and Am, here are some of the leaves that will be scattered around my bed this autumn. If I read them in order, I’ll go from England to LA to three NYC boroughs back in the day, ending up where I truly belong in fall: deep in the woods of Victorian England.

[On the Move – Oliver Sachs]
I picked this out for a friend's birthday because I knew he'd appreciate the mix of medicine and motorcycles – and figured that he'd lend it to me when he was done. (Admit it: you've done the same.) No time right now to feel sad about Sachs's death; I'm too eager to learn about his life.

AAA Rating (Autumn Appropriate Assessment): 1 Leaf
Approximately a quarter of his days were spent this time of year.

[A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith]
All I know about this famous book, more or less, is what I've gathered from the movie poster or book cover or image I made up in my mind of a sad girl in pigtails sitting on a city stoop. But I hear that it's terrific and even if it's not, I am all in on evocations of Olden Days in Brooklyn.

AAA Rating: 2 Leaves
It has tree in the title.

[Kitty Genovese: The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America – Kevin Cook]
I've been obsessed (from a healthy distance) with this event since I saw a fictionalized TV movie account in the '70s. Remarkable to learn after all these years that the defining narrative of 38 scared/apathetic neighbors was fabricated by Times reporters.

AAA Rating: 1 Leaf
Because fall is the time for true-life crime.

[Another Country – James Baldwin]
I am embarrassed never to have read this, especially given Greenwich Village, jazz and France in all their '60s glory (cigarette smoke, bad plumbing, perfect clothes). Harlem! Also, Baldwin lived on Horatio, and I love reading writers who lived on my streets almost as much as I love reading about the streets themselves.

AAA Rating: 3 Leaves
Based on the jazz alone...

[The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy]
The best Hardy that most have missed, with all of Happy Tom's keynotes: nature as an emotional force, romantic melodrama at its somehow subtle extreme, utter fearlessness about the grand gesture (man-trap dead ahead!). This will be a re-read, but I've forgotten everything since that initial encounter ca. 1989 and expect to be stunned anew.

AAA Rating: 4 Leaves
The most autumnal book ever written!