Book Review: I Can Give You Anything But Love

I Can Give You Anything But Loveby Gary IndianaRizzoli Ex Libris, 2015Whether readers come to Gary Indiana's new memoir I Can Give You Anything But Love from a familiarity with his plays or his novels (he's the author of such cuttingly good books as Horse Crazy and Rent Boy) or even the book reviewing he does for the London Review of Books (a current piece on the Tsarnaev brothers, for instance, is effortlessly definitive), there'll be a kind of wistful communal sigh of relief over the fact that when this icon of gay cultural life reached a certain age, he decided to refrain from doing the whole-hog Norma Desmond-on-quaaludes psycho-opera that recently came from his fellow gay cultural icon Larry Kramer, whose The American People was as remorseless, inscrutable, and life-changing as an 800-page heart attack. Rather, Indiana sat himself down to write a, you should pardon the term, straight memoir – no book-length digressions on Ben Franklin's array of venereal diseases, thanks very much.Instead, Indiana writes with stinging clarity and generous helpings of wit about his life – growing up in New Hampshire with a less-campy surname and moving to San Francisco in the tail-end of the Haight-Ashbury era, where, to help his roommates make the rent on their place on Broderick Street, our hero, “nineteen, obviously naive, and clueless, however jaded I tried to act,” agrees to pony up his virginity (in a “scenario lifted from a French bedroom farce”), for a price, to a shambling, disheveled old groper named Steve – after which we're off, as it were, to the races:

I was wakened by a rapturous, throaty grown, and the simultaneous thrust of a sixty-two-year-old, unlubricated member deep into my rectum. I was pinned to the mattress by a gigantic, desiccated brisket. It didn't exactly hurt. It wasn't any pleasure, either. I didn't even understand what he was doing to me until he finished doing it. I'd read about it, and heard people talk about it, but it felt so unlike what I'd expected that I thought he'd substituted some innocuous household object for his penis.

Ah, that comforting signature Gary Indiana voice! How awful and embarrassing it would have been, if he'd decided to abandon it for something more elevated in the penning of his memoirs! Instead, throughout his evocations of San Francisco, Los Angeles, 1980s New York, and the louche Cuba where he's spent so much time, the voice here is unchanged from everything else this author has ever written: enormously intelligent, catty, funny, and uncannily knowing. He can examine his own life as dispassionately as if it were a stranger's, just as he can, elsewhere in his writings, examine a stranger's life as passionately as if it were his own; it's an empathy at once pitiless and unblinking – it feels involuntary. It's the antithesis of cheap nostalgia:

A grimy curtain of sparkles hangs over these memories, probably an aftereffect of so much LSD. We lived allergic to daylight, when San Francisco felt like a graveyard under a bell jar. It had the muffled, overlit, queasy erotic gloom of Vertigo, with something in the grain of the daylight air a constant reminder that the drowsy dreamtime we occupied was sleepwalking to a bad end.

“Looking back,” he continues, “it was its own bad end: a narcotic lull in the motion of actual living, full of artificial, arbitrary dramas.”Of course, you can't have “catty” without a few scratches, and in this case one of the victims is a dear old city that always tried to treat His Nibs decently and still gets this priceless cow patty in the puss:

Boston. A mean, provincial town with a heart of shit. If you looked gay to some drunken mick from Southie or walked down the wrong street at the wrong hour, you could count on an ugly reception, and maybe get beaten to a pulp or your head bashed with a crowbar. The supposedly better element of Boston consisted of would-be bohemians floundering cluelessly in the fantasy that they lived in a cradle of civilization. As cities go, a ripe outhouse.

And woven throughout all these memories, happy and sad, is the same partially-repressed stream of dreaming that runs through all of this author's work – the longing gaze, the knee-jerk spinning of glimpses into flesh that for so long summarized the 20^th century gay experience. It crops up all over the place in I Can Give You Anything But Love, always stopping the headlong narrative just long enough for a cello-note of 'what if':

Across from my hotel balcony in Istanbul, on the top floor of a three-story yellow house, a man whose head I've never seen is lying on a duvet, naked except for black socks and white underpants, channel-flipping a TV with a remote held in a milky hand in gray darkness. I can't see how old he is or anything else about him. His sprawled flesh suggests someone who has given up and decided to live in his underpants for the rest of his life, a hibernating animal living off stored body fat. I can't really tell if he is fat, or if the faint light catching his body from the streetlamp makes him appear bloated and blubbery.

This memoir is classic Gary Indiana, waspish and gorgeous and a little wary of sharing its heart when sharing its other parts might work just as well. And despite its comprehensiveness, the book feels incomplete, like there are more such memoirs to come. May it be so.