The House of Fame

When my old friend Matthew Tolley was found dead, at the age of 35 (I think, the year escapes me now), in his Brooklyn apartment, it sent a wave through the Barzakh which aligned all that I had been reading and thinking with all that I knew and loved of him. We became friends in High School and lived together for a number of years on 1st and 1st. Matthew was an actor, a painter, a writer and musician. He was totally sui generis, hilarious, infantile, creative beyond measure and anti-authoritarian to the core. He was also a diagnosed schizophrenic. He resisted, rejected the diagnosis, and he probably was the victim of his doctors, his was a case of iatragenic madness. But it should be noted that his father, who was a respectable suburban business man, was a devotee of Edgar Cacey and heard voices. Matthew’s first hallucination occurred in high school, when he had a vision of a n angel on his ceiling, which turned into a stained glass window and crashed down on him. He self-medicated with whatever he could find, preferring tranquilizers to alcohol. He both loathed and worshipped Freud and psychoanalysis; psychoanalysis was his prime abuser. As he got older he moved out to a section of Brooklyn (Crown Heights, I think) which was as far away from the world of camp, drugs and eternal play as he could get. He worked as a waiter, not in a restaurant, but in a stodgy old private club where he waited on ancient rich men. There were often events, including one with the elder George Bush. He wanted to pour coffee on him. The waiters at these events got to glean the champagne and caviar at the end.

Matthew, after many years of not being in contact, started to call me every two weeks or so. His normal tone of voice was sarcastic and amused, slightly affected. Now he would call and sound like a working class guy with a slight NY accent. I soon realized that when he was having trouble he would sound like this. He told me that they kept giving him different medications, some of which made him appear to be drunk, which was making work difficult. He sounded very upset by the idea that the psychiatrists might be right, that he was schizophrenic. He had talk therapy with a doctor he professed to hate. One day, I was told at work that my friend Emily Lisker had called and that she was very upset. Emily and I never spoke on the phone, we only wrote or emailed each other. When I got home there was a message on the machine from Emily, hysterically upset. Matthew had called her and told her I was dead.  After that I didn’t talk to Matthew. It was too much. I had enough crisis in my life the way it was: an ex-wife with a drug problem, two very unhappy children, and Maja pregnant with Zofia. In 1996 or 1997 James Dufficy, Matthew’s closest friend, and an old friend of mine as well (he took me to watch Caligula at the Boy Bar), called to say that Matthew was found dead of an apparent overdose. I still don’t what drug or whether it was suicide. It doesn’t matter. Matthew was, or is, one of the small group of people I know here from the home planet, a soul mate.

The poem is uncharacteristic for me, almost planned. I began writing all this Matthew material, and it constellated around the idea of a medieval dream vision. Actually, there are 3 or 4 territories of poetry invoked, the medieval, the romantic, the modernist and the pop. For the medieval, I drew on dream visions like Chaucer’s House of Fame, Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, and John Skelton’s Garlande or Chapelet of the Laurel. These visions are all of the goddess in one form or another. From Skelton’s poem I got the idea of someone pleading before the goddess as Judge that he belongs in the pantheon of great poets. From Chaucer it is the idea of the Goddess Fame, and Rumour. Lydgate just has this amazing image of a glass temple. I love the imagery of glass. Peele’s Edward I has a suit of armour made of glass for a prop, which was apparently actually made and appeared on stage. In The Last Benderthe mad scientist, Dr. Bromion St. Claude, is engaged in the Glass Project, and lives in an invisible glass dome. I also got from Skelton Skeltonics. Much of the poem is written in Skeltonics.

The Romantic connection is from Shelley’s Triumph of Life, a dream vision of death leading a procession of all the dead. It is written in terza rima and is unfinished. I took from it the idea of the motley procession. The poem makes the point Aurelius does, that no matter how famous you were in life, you’ll still end up being just one of the dead, and eventually your name is like dust.

For the Moderns, it is Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly that I quote. It is one of the few Pound poems I can still read, an elegy for an age.

The rest is informed by The Pop, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (one of Matthew’s bibles) and Lou Reed’s song Chelsea Girls, sung by Nico on her first post-Velvets record, and Walk on the Wild Side, both elegies to dead scene makers, the kinds of people Matthew both loved and scorned. Enough talk. here’s the poem:

The House of Fame

 

 To what purpose am I led

 through junk apocalypse,

 prophet of what strange belief?

 My friend Matthew

 led me to the House of Fame.

 Here Fame comes on a Vespa

 against the rain spattered ruins of Rome

 in hip high boots and a mini skirt

 trailing a v-shaped wake like a swan

 of 12 Chelsea girls in checkerboard vinyl

 singing through the snarls of traffic.

 

 A Chorus follows, of eye dropper suicides,

 all the ‘smashed up baggage’ of celebrity crashes,

 in deep narcosis.

 Behind this pointed phalanx come the armies,

 the camp followers and the true boot lickers,

 deities, demons, and hags

 with punctured livers and trauma unit tags,

 all the living who envy the dead,

 the chiselers, bikers, three time losers,

 muff divers, parking lot cruisers.

 

 They send up a hoarse shout of motley joy

 in banging on black tambourines,

 mascara running in the acid rain

 down bloodless cheeks.

 They slouch back stage and suck on cigarettes

 drop to their knees and say, go away.

 

 We come to a building lit with rain,

 and stumble to a halt

 muddy grave clothes hanging into puddles.

 Fame picks up her Partridge Family lunchbox

 and ascends, and one by one

 her silver sisters follow.

 

 The silence is brutal but amazing,

 Fame lets it burn by training.  She says,

 “I love the filthy corners, the broken beams

 of photographs, sad but glorious feelings.

 I love to cough in a toilet when the faucet squeaks

 and I wash my mouth out, spitting in the little sink.”

 

 One by one,

 the hotel’s lights come on.

 

 Here’s room 1201

 it’s not a lot of fun

 sitting with Jim Morrison

 while Nico cleans the oven.

 

 Stretched out in room 1009

 Brian Jones couldn’t write a line

 he rolled off the bed like a tear drop

 a smile on his face and his blue eye

 shattered on the water dead

 

 In room 516

 we shoot crystal methedrine

 with Jean Seberg

 who had fun with the FBI

 and could compare her manic truths

 with those cooked up by Lenny Bruce

 

 In room 1011

 I met Marilyn

 she kicked off her mules

 and played guitar

 and sang

 “If only I could be as stiff

 as Monty Clift

 and as thin as Karen Carpenter

 and if you see Tennessee

 tell him Hi for me

 for Janis Joplin and John Bonham

 more successful than MacFarland

 George Sanders who was bored

 and Klaus Nomi.”

 I talked to Mara

 about the poet Frank O’Hara

 and how he died

 by the sea side

 it was very sad

 it was all we had

 of his works and reputation.

 

 Room sixty eight,

 there’s Sharon Tate

 feeling the baby

 in her belly

 on the phone

 with Truman Capote.

 Through the air shaft

 she sees Sid Vicious

 in yellow rubber gloves

 doing dishes.

 Nico’s on the phone again

 it’s all she does

 she has the time

 to watch Dark Shadows

 with Divine.

 It’s enough to make you sick

 hanging around with Edie Sedgwick

 wrapping Bridgit up with foil

 chatter click chatter click

 I love to eat

 pilled mayonnaise

 all snorts of things to eat.

 On the elevator

 we tied Stiv Bator up

 and around his neck

 we hung a Judy Garland

 and wove a Rimbaud in his hair.

 

 I said to Fame on my friend’s behalf,

 “Think of the fix as the lock

 on the vinyl church transfixed by gaiety

 the lock on transient ceilings

 sensations thick and fleeting

 turn all the nerves to eels.The PDR was Matthew’s oracle

 Hollywood Babylon his bible;

 Lives of the Saints in star biographies

 and a photo of Freud black and white

 on the gaggle of dayglo commodities.

 The images rocked

 and the tear drops rolled

 I read it in a maggotzine.

 He lived on the soil of the living

 and his blood fattened the idols

 and he was found

 face down in the glitter,

 alone in Brooklyn at 35,

 factory ordered and factory made,

 an ideal, interchangeable death.”

 

 Fame on the steps replied,

 “Your friend believes that he belongs

 among the stars but he’s wrong.

 Fame goes to looks and the luck

 he never had. Go, take him away.”

 

 I think of a bastard daughter of Fame

 whom I once new and said, “Wait.  To throw shadows

 on shadows now I attest to fishnet patterns

 and stop lights flashing on a friend’s sleeping flesh

 till one day she was stunned by her own decadence.

 Once this ideal seemed so distantly strange.

 No amount of shaved rock

 or combusted nicotine

 or doubles of Old Forrester

 could achieve the delicate mental desuetude

 not even a fistful of Quaaludes.

 Wet garbage trapped beneath grates

 and knife fights between brothers.

 Middle aged unemployed plumbers

 drank rum from plastic Nyquil caps

 and shot craps.  None of it as sad as Hopper.

 It didn’t shine as white as Trash.

 Liquid spirit could not rub the sun out.

 But by a careful study

 of the classics in paraphrase

 she learned to wear the leather face,

 ripping arbor shadows off the wall

 where the Swede ate his last bullets

 dressed in a lace teddy of light.

 Cigar smoking molls with tattoos

 a splatter of machine guns

 the black car skidding rubber.

 Like a strobe light, the thoughts

 and steam hammers ringing in the pipes

 were the back beat to her fucking,

 transfixed by syringes to the bed.

 Tralala slowly bleeding in the back seat

 impaled on a broom handle

 and the Levite’s Wife, the Whore of Gibeah,

 dismembered to remind the disparate tribes

 of their one angry father.

 Now the eye never opens

 and the mouth doesn’t speak.

 My late thought loses tongue

 and sheds its loose whispers.

 I search for a flowering iris

 its deep yellow ruffles

 anything to stir these eyes awake.”

 

 Fame swirls her fingers

 and the whole sky tingles

 as with snow swarms in streetlight.