{"id":131394,"date":"2018-12-04T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131394"},"modified":"2018-12-04T10:44:25","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T15:44:25","slug":"kevin-killians-memoirs-of-sexed-up-boozy-long-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/04\/kevin-killians-memoirs-of-sexed-up-boozy-long-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Killian\u2019s Memoirs of Sexed-Up, Boozy Long Island"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Kevin Killian. Photo: Peter E. Hanff.<\/p><\/div>\n

Every time I feel fascination
\n<\/em>I just can\u2019t stand still.
\n<\/em>\u2014David Bowie, \u201cFascination\u201d<\/p>\n

Born on Christmas Eve, 1952, in a hamlet on Long Island, Kevin Killian began his first novel, Shy<\/em>, in June 1974, after he graduated from Fordham Lincoln Center, a small liberal arts college in Midtown Manhattan. It wasn\u2019t released for another fifteen years, until the Crossing Press\u2014based in Freedom, California\u2014published a small edition in 1989. That same year also saw the publication of Killian\u2019s first memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows<\/em>. \u201cFreedom,\u201d George Michael crooned a few months later. \u201cI think there\u2019s something you should know.\u201d What? Didn\u2019t everything happen in 1989? The year the world began and the year it ended, too. Where had Killian been in those intervening fifteen years? Both books place him near his hometown: \u201cI lived in the upstairs flat of a summer bungalow on the North Shore of Long Island,\u201d Shy<\/em> opens. It concludes with a place and a date, what might even be read as a declaration: \u201cSan Francisco, September 18, 1988.\u201d \u201cI grew up in Smithtown,\u201d he begins in Bedrooms<\/em>, \u201ca suburb of New York, a town so invidious that I still speak of it in Proustian terms\u2014or Miltonic terms, a kind of paradise I feel evicted from.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the beginning of 1991, Killian was living at the edge of the Mission District on Minna Street. He was a poet. He was married to the writer Dodie Bellamy. A friend and collaborator of many artists, writers, and actors in the city, he helped found the New Narrative movement\u2014a loose arrangement of poets and novelists centered around Robert Gl\u00fcck\u2019s writing workshops at Small Press Traffic. New Narrative, with its emphasis on critical theory and identity politics, offered a fiction and poetry that took itself apart in order to make its inner and outer workings\u2014and worker\u2014transparent: a writing about the writer who\u2019s doing the writing, a kind of authorial heroism, the splaying of the self. (Derrida was a touchstone.) In a conversation with Bruce Boone, the Language poet Charles Bernstein noted that Boone, like his counterparts, foregrounded the author through repeated interventions of a writerly interest in text qua text: \u201cIt would be as if Stephen King made [some of the] comments \u2026 that you\u2019re making to me, within the novel, and talked about its links with the high and the low European [literature], to French philosophy, and so on.\u201d If the author died in the late sixties, New Narrative attempted to account for the causes of their demise in order to resurrect the corpse in a poetry and prose of flesh and blood\u2014stitched together and electroshocked back to life. The poet Cole Swensen once said that Killian\u2019s work is about the \u201cpalpability of being alive.\u201d One lives with it.<\/p>\n

Fascination: Memoirs <\/em>brings together Killian\u2019s two early memoirs:\u00a0Bedrooms Have Windows<\/em>, a choppy autobiographical story about an aspiring writer named Kevin Killian who endeavors to find his place in the sexed-up, boozy worlds of Long Island and New York in the seventies and eighties, before and in the midst of the AIDS<\/small> crisis, and its planned but ultimately unpublished sequel, Bachelors Get Lonely<\/em>, sections of which Killian included in subsequent fiction collections (1996\u2019s Little<\/em> Men <\/em>and 2001\u2019s I Cry like a Baby<\/em>).\u00a0Fascination<\/em> concludes with Triangles in\u00a0<\/em>the Sand<\/em>, a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian\u2019s brief affair in the seventies with the composer Arthur Russell. Used or remaindered, Killian\u2019s early writing\u2014including\u00a0Shy<\/em> and\u00a0his little-known novella\u00a0Desiree<\/em> (1986)\u2014has long been difficult to find in the wild (the wild, not the Web, being its rightful place, really) and has since accrued an almost cult status among readers of experimental and gay prose writing, like that of the early works of Killian\u2019s peers: Steve Abbott, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Robert Gl\u00fcck, Bruce Boone, and others. Cooper once described Shy<\/em> as \u201cmind-bending, trashy, and Dickensian.\u201d The novel \u201cdrove me wild.\u201d James Purdy, who Killian has long cited as an influence, called it \u201ca book of sparklers.\u201d Boone wrote that Bedrooms<\/em> would cement\u00a0Killian\u2019s\u00a0place as one of \u201cthe brightest stars in the sex\/experimental writing firmament.\u201d Holding this two-part volume of such writing, a new reader, perhaps one more familiar with Killian\u2019s poetry (of which he has published four volumes, two in recent years), might wonder how exactly his nonfiction plots along the axis Boone describes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In \u201cSex Writing and the New Narrative,\u201d a 1990 essay that alternates between a love scene with two men and an analysis of \u201clanguage, narration, and representation,\u201d Killian writes that \u201call narrative is corrupt insofar as it attempts to ape the realities of our lives \u2026 Corruption of the body, of the text, of the story.\u201d Killian argues that words are both insufficient in their effort to \u201cformulate a representation of life\u201d and irresistible, too. They are gamely partners in a cruise-or-be-cruised world, their corruption suggestive and tantalizing:<\/p>\n

\u201cSex writing\u201d \u2026 differs from other forms of representation in that it has some kind of chemical effect on the reader. I get hard, I can\u2019t contain myself. A fugue results, between the closed system of language and the complex system of molecules that holds my body together a real communication begins. Obedience \u2026 These include the disjunctions, strangenesses and confusions of sexual gender we live with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I read this as a distinctly queer, even specifically gay, update of Lyn Hejinian\u2019s well-known essay \u201cThe Rejection of Closure\u201d (1983), in which she establishes a handy binary of \u201cclosed\u201d and \u201copen\u201d texts. In the latter, \u201call the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work.\u201d Killian is likewise interested in the excitability of language\u2014so much so that it gets him hard. What about us, its readers?<\/p>\n

Hejinian argues that the difference between the world and the word produces a gap, or let\u2019s say a hole, that most of us need to fill, prod, tongue. That\u2019s poetry, and that\u2019s sex writing. It prompts a feeling, a physical sensation. You put the book down. You walk around. You text a friend. You can hardly keep still. You grow pleasantly bored, filled with enough plot or verse for the day, and snoop for porn. Am I being too literal? Hejinian incorporates Umberto Eco\u2019s idea of \u201cinferential walks\u201d\u2014those instances where \u201cthe reader has to \u2018walk,\u2019 so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather intertextual support,\u201d Eco writes\u2014into her more general idea that language \u201cis productive of activity.\u201d She notes that words appear to us as \u201cattractive, magnetic to meaning.\u201d Flirtatious, Killian might add. We chase them, since they are the means to an immanent poetry or prose\u2014that is, a forward-looking writing concerned with itself, with its own mechanics and the mechanic him- or herself. The open (or New Narrative) text develops as an evocative experience of reading rather than a mere recording of experience. In a later poem, \u201cHelium,\u201d Killian puts it simply: \u201cThe balloon that once blown up assumes a shape and an ending. \/ Pop, then, deflates your sentence \/ into life.\u201d Pop.<\/p>\n

Both Bedrooms<\/em> and Bachelors<\/em> concern Killian\u2019s \u201creal life,\u201d though neither dwells on the provable connections between the living writer and his protagonist so much as they attempt, in their corrupt desire to ape and supplant reality with their own exigencies, to stand in place of private memory as a public document, as this book you hold in hand: the realer deal than whatever was once real. Scenes splurge, come and go, elaborate in nonsequential tellings and retellings of Killian\u2019s late teens to adulthood. Self-exiled from the gates of suburban Eden (anyone can be normal if he wants to be, right?), Killian makes regular, restless visits to New York\u2019s profane streets, finding himself occasionally employed, frequently lost, \u201csealed in with the dismal frightened figures of subway America.\u201d In Bedrooms<\/em>, while hitching in Smithtown, he meets Carey Denham, a man old enough to be his father, with whom he begins an affair:<\/p>\n

\u201cTake me to New York,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShow me where it is on the map,\u201d Carey said. His right hand touched my cock. The names of the roads on the map blurred before my eyes like a turning kaleidoscope. That\u2019s the night I fell in love for the first time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout both memoirs, Killian analyzes this poise of innocence as it becomes increasingly complicated by his growing awareness of it as a poise<\/em>, as even a sexual politics\u2014specifically through a friendship with George Grey, \u201cthe unclaimed son of Gypsy Rose Lee,\u201d who rouses Killian to a hunger for the broad belt of the wider world, for whatever the American mainland holds. (Funny to remember that Long Island, with its postwar fantasy of cookie-cutter America, is just that: an island.) Innocence, he realizes, holds the key to personality\u2014lie around long enough and eventually someone will tell you what to do.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure if Kevin in Bedrooms<\/em> or Bachelors<\/em> could find New York on a map\u2014not because he\u2019s unaware of his Northeastern geography but because he\u2019s simply too distracted and too turned on to really<\/em> get there. Men lead him along, and it is the appearance of new faces and bodies\u2014new names, new words\u2014that pushes him from A to B and back again:<\/p>\n

There has to be a person inside the story, I wonder why \u2026 But when a person came into my story I stood there and felt conscious of everything, like it was all new, like everything in my life was all new, and I wonder why; if our souls are so constituted, or if there\u2019s something sexual about it I don\u2019t comprehend.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Innocence is punctured by Killian\u2019s increasing alcoholism, by fear of AIDS<\/small>, by depressive episodes of writerly self-deprecation (\u201cAt the end of my days, when I\u2019m borne to my grave a hoary corpse, they will carve no hopeful verse upon my tombstone, for my dying hours were gloom\u201d), and the progression from Smithtown to Minna Street is marked by the violence of sex and depravity of desire. Each crisis of timing or catastrophe of personality arrives as its own Sword of Damocles hanging in the air above him, ever ready to rend fragile happiness.<\/p>\n

In Bachelors<\/em>, Killian\u2019s need for booze becomes a dominant motivating force, both compounding and accounting for a desire increasingly complicated by the looming threat of AIDS<\/small> in the years before protease inhibitors, when most anyone who developed the disease died from it. And everyone was dying from it. He scurries down the Long Island Expressway in summer, a scene-in-miniature of some of the fears that compel the narrative forward: \u201cMy little car vibrated under me, as though its engine were announcing exciting plans to fall apart, but I didn\u2019t pay much attention. Tears were drying on my face.\u201d The world is not whole; he is most grateful for the bottle between his legs. Life does fall apart: a boyfriend is impaled by a shard of mirror during a kinky shower session. Blood darkens the running water. The guy manages to orgasm but slumps over when he\u2019s finished. Killian can only imagine toasting their sex with Glenlivet:<\/p>\n

Was he sleeping? Unconscious? His blond hair matted red, brown, black; his smile gave no clue, his big lips slack, happy, purple and gray as the petals of a sterling silver rose. I nudged him with the Glenlivet. He didn\u2019t seem to want a drink, again I\u2019m like\u2014????? Then I dressed, found my keys, left the motel. I guess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout these two books, Killian is content with memory\u2019s ambivalences, its ambiguities, its moment of \u201cI guess,\u201d when the distinction between fact and fiction dissolves. In situating themselves in memory\u2019s drift, its blur, Killian\u2019s memoirs remain as vibrant now as they did in the late eighties, palpably alive with sex and politics, music and poetry. Killian\u2019s past is strange, drunken, a little lost, but it belongs to our present as a handy record for those of us who need a reminder that sometimes a direction can be found in the reckoning.<\/p>\n

Move along the velvet rope, run your shaky fingers past the lacquered zigzag Keith Haring graffito: \u201cYou did not live in our time! Be sorry!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Durbin lives in New York. He is the author of <\/em>Mature Themes (Nightboat, 2014) and <\/em>MacArthur Park (Nightboat, 2017), which was a finalist for the 2018 Believer Book Award in fiction.<\/em><\/p>\n

Andrew Durbin\u2019s introduction to <\/em>Fascination: Memoirs<\/a>,<\/em> by Kevin Killian, published by Semiotext(e).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kevin Killian\u2019s past is strange, drunken, a little lost, but it belongs to our present as a handy record for those of us who need a reminder that sometimes a direction can be found in the 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