My Personal Experience with the Great Neck Conception of Literature
My Personal Experience with the Great Neck Conception of English Literature
By
David Gottfried
Jackie was a writer. She certainly seemed like one.
She had a dainty, silver cigarette case that always sported the finest marijuana; a majestically angular, anorexic frame; and small tits and short hair, which suggested lesbianism and hence cultural sophistication.
I knew her in college, in a school known as Hoffenbraus. It wasn’t a terribly bright college. My friends and I called it a JAP school, or a school for Jewish American Princesses, and as such it was frequented by chatty, brassy girls who roared onto the campus, from Great Neck and other wealthy New York suburbs, in their bright and glitzy Alpha Romeos. The girls were gaudy clones of Brenda Potempkin, a rich Jewish girl in Philip Roth’s “Goodbye Columbus,” dripping as they were with mishegas stewed in shmaltz, but sometimes rye bread dipped in chicken fat is the perfect pick me up, and if these girls were a tad vacuous, they were, at the very least, amusing and pretty.
But Jackie was not about to be amusing or pretty, at least not in any conventional sense. Her raison d’etre was to exude a spark of something utterly artistic and edified that reeked of an aesthetically elegant English paradise that existed only on educational television in the United States. And so she dressed in funereal black decades before Downtown decried color. She consumed illegal drugs with great frequency and made certain that her use of drugs was well known, entertaining the notion that publicity of her illicit exploits would inculcate a proper artistic aura. She had sex with lots of men but always suggested that she was a terribly witty lesbian.
Her wit did not consist of puns, or of irony, or any of those things normally associated with wit. Rather, she held herself out as someone who was witty because she could be counted on to say the most audacious and extreme comments whenever the spirit moved her. And so when an elderly gentlemen stopped off at our class to discuss his mediocre but earnest poetry, she took note of the fat hanging from his pectoral muscles and declaimed, “Your tits are bigger than mine.” Although this remark was offensive, Jackie was in the free and clear. No one would bother her for being a bitch. First, it was seventies, and feminism was in its ascendance, and on our college campus a woman’s attack on a man and on his manhood was, no matter how crass and callous, given the benefit of the doubt and presumed to be politically virtuous. Second, Jackie simply looked too exquisite -- she was always dolled up in something that was a careful hybrid of the rich bitch and the bohemian; she had enough of the former to suggest luxuries, aristocratic sarcasm and gratuitous insults with just enough of the latter to fortify her radical credentials -- to permit any attacks on her queenly persona. Third, there was her voice. It was oddly deep for a women’s voice, exceptionally petulant, and neurotically nasal in a Woody Allen sort of way. It was a voice, in short, like the voice of Lou Reed, in one of his most decadent songs, explaining that he would have to murder someone for selling him poor quality dope. The amorality and autism inherent in her voice was just so perfect, was so in tune with the tenor of the times, narcissism and orgiastic sexuality, that one would not dare oppose her; one simply smiled and agreed like a whimpering castrato.
And so the teachers – who did not have a tenth of her wealth and were, notwithstanding their professed disinterest in Mammon, thoroughly enamored of her – and her fellow students and whoever had the poor luck to alit on the campus of our pretentious and squalid hot house of a university – came to treat Jackie as if she were the epitome of rock and roll, art, and radical royalty all rolled-up into one.
If she were wearing jeans and conspicuously expensive earrings, she would swagger through our Ivied Halls imagining herself a Jewish Bianca Jagger, ready, at a moment’s notice, to swap stories, in a very loud voice, about all manner of perverse but profound trysts. If she had on a peasant skirt, and had just seen Jane Fonda in “Coming Home,” she would implant a wistful look in her eyes and remind us that she was intent of rivaling the finest work of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Rachel Carson – that Rachel Carson was in a wholly different line of work meant nothing; they all shared the same Mother Earth soulfulness. If Jackie had just watched Masterpiece Theatre, and if she had just partaken of some excellent tea and scones, she would put on her spikiest heels and most authoritative pearls and purport to be the second coming of Virginia Woolf, an artist whom she never really read but knew she had to adore because of her misandry, lesbianism, and all-around witchery.
Now although she never read Woolf, she knew that her poetry had to have been as fine as anything Woolf wrote. After all, Jackie knew, just simply knew, that her mind simply sparkled and percolated with thoughts and ideas so brilliant that they had to have surpassed the thoughts and imagination of everyone else. Jackie knew this every time she interrupted someone, knowing full well that whatever anyone else had to say could not compare with what Jackie had to say. Jackie knew this every time she hogged the camera at a party, fervent in the belief that her image was the most exciting image in the mix. And so her poetry, which did not rhyme – to have rhymed would have been disgustingly saccharine and childish – which was devoid of meter – rhythmic compulsions in one’s verse were so blatantly anal – and which lacked any metaphorical complexity but still could not be understood by anyone other than the author --consisted, for the most part, of explosive exclamations, scatological comments, amalgamated images of hip, or aggregations of phrases that referred to groovy things and made the reader know that one was opposed to United States’ imperialism, in favor of bisexuality, a connoisseur of herbal tea, and a frequent visitor to Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Greenwich Village.
Greenwich Village was not far from our Suburban New York campus, and on the weekends Jackie often journeyed there. She always had a wonderful time. Much of Manhattan was far from gentrified in those days, and it did not take too much cash and moxie for a rich, pretty girl from Long Island or Jersey to mow down and decimate the fairies and the artists who made the overpriced walk-ups, tenements and single room occupancy hotels of the Westside their home. And so Jackie might attend some sort of open-mike cabaret, and at this cabaret an elderly waif of a fag might proceed, in a scratched and faint voice, to orate lines of poetry as sensitive and refined as Yeats, but then Jackie, smashing in jewels and leathers and satins, would wow the crowd with her bucks, grab and grind the mike with her hips, and deliver a few pungent lines of pornographic verse to make her presence known. Of course, all work and no fun will make any artist an ugly troll, and so Jackie often attended New York’s dazzling clubs and discos and was one of Studio Fifty Four’s most loyal recidivists. At Studio Fifty-Four, she was nothing short of resplendent, reveling in her haute anorexic angularity, snorting cocaine as if it were the devil’s manna, and dancing with the febrile intensity of patients having electric shock induced seizures in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
After she was graduated from college, she finally moved to Greenwich Village, selecting a one-bedroom apartment, in the immediate vicinity of Sheridan Square – the epicenter of gay New York in the Seventies – at a monthly rental of $700.00, which was a steep price for most New Yorkers in those days but no sweat for Jackie. And then, proudly ensconced in a luxury dwelling that many New Yorkers would have fought for years to acquire, she attacked the streets and scenes of New York, secure in the notion that a brilliant career was hers for the taking. She wrote poetry in the presumed tradition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence,” which poignantly stated that “the words of the prophets are written on subways walls and tenement halls,” assured in the belief that as a resident of Manhattan, whose window’s vista was marred by chimneys and congestion, she was a certified member of the Proletariat and a brave woman warrior for the working class. She took all sorts of courses at the New School for Social Research, engaging in the most laborious and diligent preparations for her classes, taking pains to present a form, stake-out a pose and don an outfit that would simply scream at everyone with all the savoir faire of Audrey Hepburn taken to the ten thousandth power of egocentric insanity. At times she might go to school in clothing that might suggest that she was a journalist for a provocative, leftist French periodical -- perhaps some sort of khaki ensemble topped off with Jackie O’s supercilious sunglasses. She took up photography, and assiduously stalked shy people, feeling a little more manic and menacing each time she captured one’s likeness without one’s permission. She went to avant garde films, enjoying the best espresso brownies at every performance; sophisticated cafes and bistros, where she munched on the most intelligent dish of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Quiche lorraine; and So Ho art galleries, where the paintings on the walls became a frame for her body and she became the exhibit of the day.
And what an exhibit she was. Her sleek, thin lines were complemented by her fingers, which were very elongated tentacles, deathly white and as fast as a croupier’s hand, ready to stir up the muck; her pointy, pushy alligator footwear, which sang Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walking;” and her all-pervasive glittery aura that made even the ice cubes in her cocktail glass appear to be giant-sized diamonds, shimmering in the unyielding luminosity of her being.
Now standing in a gallery, endeavoring to put just enough fire in one’s eyes and irreverence in one’s posture to exude an air of unmitigated arrogance, will not, in and of itself, assure glad tidings in one’s bank accounts. It should not suffice to give one good reviews, or make one published, printed, and ready to be packaged for the masses outside of Manhattan – so they can then experience the misery of beholding, and being jealous of, a new artist. However, for Jackie this had to suffice. Besides, the finest artists – the Mick Jaggers and the Patti Smiths and the Friedrich Nietzsche’s – always sneered at the world.
However, toward the conclusion of the seventies, and then in earnest as the eighties were upon us, sneering no longer did the trick. That which was caustic and confrontational and cutting edge was now derided as merely rude. Carter was being shoved aside by Reagan. Although the sixties had died long ago, at around the time Nixon walloped Mc Govern or perhaps long before then, it limped on, dead, but not really dead, like a spirit inhabiting a body barely alive. The sixties had lingered-on in the reflexive and facile radicalism of the young, the longish hair, and the deteriorating rock music that no longer seemed to have anything to say, any power to shock or any joy to make us want to let it all hang-out. However, after the Iranians seized our embassy in Tehran, the voice that was Jackie was no longer a compelling call to revolution. It was just a pain in the ass.
Jackie had to do some thinking, and fast. Now, although she was not much of an artist, and not much of a scholarly thinker – if she had read an article on the Op Ed page of The New York Times she knew she had done so much intellectual heavy-lifting for the day that she was entitled to spend the rest of the day smoking pot – she was, as the preceding paragraphs suggest, a strategic thinker with street sense. She knew how to project the right image at parties. She knew how to be chic in the Paul Mazursky Seventies. Now she needed a game plan for the Reagan 1980’s.
Being a bitch heralding the death of fascist American macho would not cut it anymore. Besides, it was getting harder and harder for her to write those manifestos, struggling to conjure-up the perfect three or four sentences to scream at an artistic happening. Also, she was not getting any younger, and she was putting on a couple of pounds. Although there always was a scene for fat dykish women in New York, she wanted to be devastatingly stylish and svelte and the expansion of her waist, in plain view of all of Manhattan, was something she could not abide.
So Jackie finally became the Princess she always swore that she wasn’t. She married a fabulously wealthy, cynical lawyer, kept house, got her hair done every week, and lived sarcastically ever after.