The day after I first read Michael Rumaker I (somehow) walked into a wide concrete column near turnstiles at the 125th St. IRT station. (Luckily a piano tuner I know vaguely happened by as I was feeling the bump and the blood—he had a clean paper tower and alcohol to disinfect the small cut over my eye.) That accident helped tune me into another reader’s angle on the Rumaker effect. In Russell Banks’ intro to the 1991 reprint of Rumaker’s collection, “Gringos and other stories,” he recalls how those tales, which Rumaker began publishing in the 50s and 60s, shocked Banks and his crew of fledgling writers back in that day. Rumaker seems to have been fated to remain a secret writer/influence but, as Banks notes, that wasn’t “because his work was especially difficult or obscure—it was frighteningly simple and direct, as accessible as a kick in the shins.” Or a knock on the block?
Forgive me if it seems like I’m trying to force an uptown koan. But that stony column (and sting of alcohol) reminds me of the thingness of things in Rumaker’s stories (such as “The Pipe” or “The Truck” or “The Bar” or “The Desert”). Rumaker provided his own practicum—“the physical can be made to yield psychic responses”—in a brief 50s essay, “The Uses of Unconscious in Writing” (included in Gringos). Rumaker wasn’t talking up cheap symbolism. He insisted a writer must give the object its due—“to get the thing there” without “despoiling it,” without reducing it to a mere means of self-expression.
Rumaker’s way into the world (and the unconscious) seems to have made him (per Banks) a progenitor of “dirty realism.” Banks suggests Rumaker got where more renowned writers like Raymond Carver would end up going decades later because Rumaker had locked into an American “tradition of storytelling that goes back through Nelson Algren to Sherwood Anderson and before him to Stephen Crane.” Charles Olson, who was one of Rumaker’s mentors when he went to Black Mountain College in the 50s, thought Rumaker was an heir of Dreiser. I’ve got my own line of succession. For me, Rumaker’s stories are lit by Hemingway’s The Light of the World. In that story—a marvel of compaction—Hem keeps finding that dirty-sweet-spot. His stand-in, Nick Adams, is traveling light with a mouthy buddy named Tom who gets most of the punch lines…
Tom reached over and took the glass off the free-lunch bowl. It was a bowl of pickled pig’s feet and there was a wooden thing that worked like a scissors, with two wooden forks at the end to pick them up with.
“No,” said the bartender and put the glass cover back on the bowl.
Tom held the wooden scissors fork in his hand. “Put it back,” said the bartender.
“You know where,” said Tom.
Nick and Tom aren’t long for that bar. Back on the street (which “smelled of hides and tan bark and the big piles of sawdust”), they head for the train station where they run into “five whores …six white men and four Indians…”
“How old are you boys?”
“I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine,” Tommy said.“Ho! Ho! Ho!” the big whore shook with laughing. She had a really pretty voice. The other whores didn’t smile.
Nick gets a little groove for that big woman, Alice, who speaks truths of lust, unlike one of her co-sex-workers who tries to con everyone, including herself, with a fantasy about her genteel romance with a mighty white prize fighter. Both boys fend off not-quite come-ons of a fastidious gay man who’s mocked by other adults in the room (except for Alice). Tom finishes the story by cutting that gay man:
“Which way are you boys going?” asked the cook. “The other way from you,” Tom told him.
But that gay character is still on the map. And he links Hem’s road story with Rumaker’s slangy tales of working class men going nowhere quick since those narratives tend to be bent by figures of gay desire. In the late 50s, John Wieners—a writer-friend of Rumaker’s whom he met at Black Mountain—was wowed by a scene in Rumaker’s “Exit 3” where a drunken marine kisses a good (and maybe gay) Samaritan on the lips. Rumaker dared to follow where his stories led him and he cruised for gay sex in the 50s, but he wasn’t at ease with his own homosexuality then. When Wieners went on to publish his own “Poem for Cocksuckers,” Rumaker didn’t try to catch up with his friend (though they did a lot of speed together). He stayed closeted for years and years, though gay characters in his early stories often seem to carry the light of the world.
If Hem got pretty near roads traveled in Rumaker’s “Exit 3” and other tales in Gringos, Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) went deep into those neighborhoods. “The Queen is Dead” section of Selby’s novel, which limns a street aesthete/transvestite’s love for a thug, fulfills what’s promised by “Rosemary” in Rumaker’s story, “The Bar.” S/he hangs on the edge of a gang of petty thieves. Out of their world, she teases them in a jazzy lingo derived from that of a real queen of the night Rumaker drank with once in NOLA.
Selby and Rumaker ran in the same Black Mountain cum Beat circles. (In the Lost and Found collection of Rumaker’s correspondence, like a great armful of wonderful flowers, there’s a letter about a party thrown by LeRoi Jones in the Village where Rumaker bumped into Selby.) Rumaker, who grew up as an outlier in a large Catholic working class family from Philly, has written memoirs focused on 50s surrounds that enabled him to become a writer. His Robert Duncan in San Francisco is a testament to the city and the liberated gay poet who became one of his avatars (though he resisted Duncan’s come-ons). Rumaker arrived in San Francisco, after hitchhiking from Philly, the night after Allen Ginsberg gave one of his (three) readings of “Howl” in the city. Rumaker was having a beer down by the waterfront when the bar suddenly filled up with giddy revelers laughing and shouting “Ginsberg for President.” Rumaker would go on to become friends with Ginsberg (after writing an un-rhapsodic though respectful review of “Howl”). More on them anon, but, to Rumaker, San Francisco in the 50s was Duncan’s city:
Action was wherever Robert Duncan was. Robert lived with Jess Collins in a large comfortable apartment in a gray frame house on Potrero Hill, the old Russian section of the city. The walls were hung with paintings by Jess and others, and lined with bookshelves built by Jess for the apartment. There was a small desk Robert used only for writing letters. In the bathroom you could read Jess’ cut-up and reassembled Dick Tracy comic strips, mounted on the wall over the toilet, while you pissed. [As Duncan himself once mused: “You can’t take a piss in this house without getting hit with a myth.”] The apartment was filled with an abundance and pleasant disorder of beloved objects. I felt comfortable there. It was like a shelter against all that was around it.
Duncan sheltered in place with Jess but he had a history of bravery in the public square. Back in 1944, he’d published an essay in Dwight McDonald’s radical journal, politics, affirming his own humanity and that of his gay brothers. Duncan, that “Ambassador from Venus,” was already in the future when he composed “The Homosexual in Society” —“Where the Zionists of homosexuality have laid claim to a Palestine of their own, asserting in their miseries, their nationality.” Dwight McDonald knew Duncan was putting himself at risk if he came out as the author of this manifesto and he proposed Duncan might protect himself by publishing it anonymously. Duncan shut that idea down:
It is only by my committing myself openly that the belief and the desire of others for an open and free discussion of homosexual problems may be encouraged…the whole thing has no meaning if it’s not signed.
He paid immediately for his choice, which led the editor of a prominent literary magazine to trash plans to publish Duncan’s poetry.
Duncan’s courage and talent were wrapped up in a piquant social package. He was, as Rumaker noted in an interview appended to the most recent edition of Robert Duncan in San Francisco, something of a “peacock.” Rumaker was glamoured to be around Duncan, but he couldn’t bring himself to come out like the poet. And since he was still in the closet, Duncan’s persona became a kind of constant goad. Rumaker writes sharply about how Duncan managed to have an open and closed life, thanks to his stable domestic partnership with Jess. Duncan had affairs, but, unlike Rumaker, he tended not to cruise and thus avoided the risk of being harassed by vice squads who acted like storm-troopers in the 50s.
Rumaker begins his account of his sixteen months in San Francisco by diving back into that city by the sea where something was astir “in the light and spaciously open air…”
It seemed like everyone was writing and painting and making music. Dress, hair, talk was shaggier, rawer; fresh idioms of speech were possible. To me, the look and talk of those most actively involved was like an extension and coalescence of earlier Black Mountain changearounds that cohered and emerged simultaneously in Swananoa Valley and the Bay Area. Jazz was all over the place and poets were reading their poems to it. Speech and manner got quirkier, the surprise of variance and singular eccentricity was everywhere in North Beach. It was haven and matrix for the possible, as was that other center, Potrero Hill…
But after Rumaker recalls his flings with “the possible,” the whip comes down. His book brings home the scarifying dailiness of life for American homosexuals in the pre-Stonewall era. His own face-offs with the Great Fear in Frisco culminated when he was arrested for “loitering with lewd intent” one night. He’d gone to see Miles Davis play in a club earlier that same evening and Miles’ horn had seemed to speak directly to him. Sated by the music, he chose not to cruise that night, but still ended up being picked up by cops who claimed he was on the prowl. What happened next—trip in paddy wagon with shamed others (all eyes averted), sleepless night in jail, morning struggle to swing bail, courtroom appearance days later (on the down low as he couldn’t let his employer know) —shocked Rumaker to the core. The episode seems to have marked the start of a doomy downward spiral, which led him to spend years in a mental hospital and more than a decade drugging and drinking. Not that there weren’t respites when he managed to write on. In the early 60s, he published a novel, The Butterfly, fictionalizing his affair with a young Yoko Ono, before he faded out again.
The comeback that lasted was linked to his coming out. The Gay liberation movement got him going (and got him sober). He spells out what the movement meant to him in a blissful letter about the 1979 gay march on Washington. (You can read the full letter here along with other selections from his correspondence.) Rumaker ran into Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky at the march and he tells how they strolled arm in arm down the rest of the parade route with him reminiscing about when he’d first met them “22 years before crossing 6th Ave…
Allen telling me a psychiatrist at P.I. had said to him: “If you’re homosexual be a homosexual, it’s all right” and how he had no trouble with it after that, suggesting it was something I needed to do, too, but of course I wasn’t able to then, it wasn’t my time, (some of us need to go longer, more roundabout routes, sometimes there are no shortcuts).
Rumaker’s great day in D.C. ended on a “lovely last note”:
As my faggot friends and I were heading back to our buses for the trip back to NYC, I looked back over my shoulder and told the others to look – there was a lavender (honest to goddess) sunset; I’m certain a wink of cosmic approval. As I said, old Walt [Whitman] would’ve loved it; I certainly did. And his spirit, along with all the other dyke and faggot spirits of our forebears, was very much present.
That purple passage would serve as a nice finish to any version of Rumaker’s life and times, but I want to return to a bluer story of gay liberation—Rumaker’s A Day and Night in the Baths (1977). In that tale (pace LeRoi Jones) of homosexual healing in the 70s, a Rumaker-like narrator details his first trip to gay baths (the old Everard on 28th St. in New York City). Let’s stipulate this novella is in some ways out of time; it belongs to the pre-AIDS era. Its case for paganism/hedonism and sexual license has been superseded by the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Now that gays can marry, the notion promiscuity is freeing or intrinsic to homoeroticism seems anachronistic. Yet A Day and a Night in the Baths isn’t traduced by its old ideas. Thanks to Rumaker’s facts of feeling and knack for making things yield meanings, his Day and a Night remains wonderfully untired.
Allen Ginsberg’s praise of the book’s author hinted at its freshness—“Rumaker an original prose creator of great shamed heroic sensitivity.” Ginsberg also underscored the text’s universal qualities:
[A Day and a Night in the Baths] is something straight men can read if they want to know what goes on in the baths—a generous glimpse, intimate details, perfect first trip, Whitmanic in delicacy, full of optimism and good will—and strange shafts of perception like sunset light playing round the head of Empire State building…
Ginsberg was invoking one of those things of the spirit that define Rumaker’s artful constructs. In between trysts, in need of fresh air in the dank Everard, the story’s narrator returns to a small window at the end of a corridor where he can see flower shops and the Empire State Building. He breathes in the cold breeze and takes in the view—“one final wink of the day across the tenements and skyscrapers of the gritty, windswept city…”
There was an erotic jest in that wink to match my own lovely feeling: in its last blink of light the setting sun transformed the Empire State Building into a giant erection, ingot-red, that poked its head through the low, bare-bottomed clouds which were pink-flushed and cumulously voluptuous.
There are other winks from the eye of eros in the novella. One of the narrator’s sexual partners avoids anal sex with him, explaining: “I’m giving my brown eye a little shut-eye. Did you know eros spelled backwards is sore?”
Ginsberg was right that A Day and the Night is full of good will and humor. But Rumaker doesn’t shy away from sadder sides of the baths. His narrator’s sexual exaltations don’t keep him from noticing those who aren’t having good times—graceless guys who can’t get laid even at the Everard or sex addicts who can’t ever get enough. In one scene, he encounters a lost boy who seems stuck on punish-fucks.
His expression was poignant. I stood in the doorway for a long moment, not knowing what to do or say. Probably better just to go away. Humanism can be inhuman.
He keeps moving and as this straight reader followed his curvey spirals (“what true gay is…not lines and boxes”) it occurred to me this “perfect first trip” to the baths amounted to a revision of Dante’s journey in the Inferno’s underworld. (And, yup, “every one of them words rang true/And glowed like burnin’ coal/Pourin’ off of every page/Like it was written in my soul”.) The narrator’s momentary retreat from empathy is anything but final. A few graphs on, Rumaker has him pull off a grand summative act of imagination where he evokes the variousness of denizens of the baths.
Eros isn’t stingy. But the unwanted are here, too, and the too wanted. The too handsome and the not handsome enough, the ugly and the deformed—even one youth struggling about the halls on aluminum crutches, his twisted legs strapped in metal braces (“There is no end to desire”)—And the very old and the very young, they, too, are here. The cock-teasers, too, I saw, who lured you and when you approached aroused, pushed you away roughly, often with a sneer. Macho guys were here who needed, always, to be on top, to “win” at all costs, where the partner doesn’t count except as a used and humiliated participant in their petty glorification. The scrawny with no chins and the chubby with too many, those with pipestem legs and those with the legs of weight-lifters. The small-cocked, the big cocked, the slender peckered and the stout pricked, the loose-assed and the tight-assed, the beer-bellied and the flat-gutted; and all those who gave better than they get—All here with all their fantasies and desires, their little lies and big ones, their bent dreams and passing straight dreams and dreams of soaring and airy gayety—The beautiful on the outside who are poisoned inside; and the physically ugly who keep close and quiet a loveliness within that many are blind to, often even themselves—All prowl these dreary dim halls with the same purpose and search: to find, surprised behind the monotonous row on row of cheap plywood doors, endlessly opening and closing , the heart’s desire and the awakener of the heart; the miracle of a barely imagined paradise here in this dingy smelly place, heavy with stale body odors and decades-old perspiration of lust-sweat, and fear-sweat, and ashes of sperm-fire that encrust the walls and floors and ceilings from all the century-long years of those who have searched here in unspeakable pleasure and pain (for there is unspeakable pain here, too); searching patiently and tirelessly to discover, in sly and passionate ambush, in the litter and stink of this hidden away bathhouse in a floral market street of the city, a tiny glint of the shy and elusive flower that enfolds the secret and the meaning. And each of us brings that here, furled tight in the unconscious, in the cellar of need, prowling for it in this house where sunlight is not, nor moonlight, nor nurturing air and moisture, our vision purblind, slaking our thirst on ashes.
Those ashes find an echo in the book’s epitaph, which is dedicated to “nine who died” when a fire destroyed the Everard Baths on the morning of May 25, 1977:
And, out of the ashes and truth of all despair,
and in spite of it,
to the spirit of the rainbow and lesbian phoenix, rising
Now, though, all those ashes flash a reader forward to the AIDS era (when baths that hadn’t burnt down would have to be shut down). The humane optimism of A Day and a Night in the Baths takes on a new poignancy when you realize that it was…contagious. Then again, nobody ever had to teach Rumaker that art knows us better than we know ourselves. While it must have been devastating for him to learn it all over again as he witnessed so many of his people die in the homosexual hecatomb of the 80s, he didn’t give into despair. He Acted Up and tried to stay in gay sunshine per his advice to an old correspondent: “Keep shining and shining.”
I’m glad I’m no longer in the dark about his work, yet I regret not having a chance to reflect a little light back at him while he was still here. Born in 1932, Michael Rumaker died last summer.