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Overview
Proclaimed “the most dangerous writer in America” by the Village Voice, Dennis Cooper began his controversial novel cycle with Closer, introducing readers to the enigmatic George Miles. A physically beautiful and strangely passive teenager, George attracts his fellow students with irresistible mystery, like a wallet lying on the street. One after another, his friends rifle through him searching for love or simply momentary relief from the mindlessness of middle America.
George passes through the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, who turns his parents’ garage into a nightclub. But George remains a tantalizing blur until he’s picked up by two men in their forties. Tom and Philippe, obsessed with the beauty of death, believe George to be the perfect object for their passion.
Like Jean Genet and William Burroughs, Dennis Cooper assaults the senses as he engages the mind in this “bleak and brilliant” novel that deserves recognition as “(at least) a minor classic” (John Ash, The Washington Post Book World).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555847753 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Series: | George Miles Cycle , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 146 |
| File size: | 630 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
JOHN
THE BEGINNER
John, 18, hated his face. If his nose were smaller, his eyes a different brown, his bottom lip pouty ... As a kid he'd been punched in the mouth and looked great for a couple of weeks. Six years ago punk rock had focused his life. John liked the way punk romanticized death, and its fashions made pretty good camouflage. He dyed his hair blue-black, wore torn T-shirts, smeared his eyes with mascara, and stared at the floors of his school like they were movie screens. He'd never felt more comfortable with himself.
Nowadays punk bored his schoolmates. John stuck it out, but the taunts and cold shoulders were threatening to ruin his new confidence. One afternoon he hitchhiked home, grabbed a pencil and paper and wrote down his options. "Make enemies." Trouble was, he'd always felt so indifferent toward people. "Therapy." That might have meant he was hopeless. "Art." On the strength of some doodles he'd done as a kid, and that his mother had raved about, he enrolled in a life drawing class.
John's teacher was fairly impressed. He announced to the class that the "work" was "unique" and compared it to "brilliant police sketches." John knew this was only a guess but the attention was just what he needed, so he refused to confirm or deny any interpretation, no matter how stupid. It was the tactic his favorite bands had always used to stay hip. That did the trick. Students would crowd around him after school and kind of hint how they wouldn't mind modeling when he had a moment.
He didn't have time to draw everyone, but being picky meant choosing an artistic goal. John couldn't. He didn't know what he was doing. He wound up selecting the best-looking students because they were fun to deface, and pretty easy to bullshit. He'd just sort of casually say that maybe he was portraying how tortured they were behind their looks and they'd gasp at his scribbles like they were seeing God or a UFO.
One afternoon a sophomore named George Miles took a seat in John's bedroom and tried not to blink. He'd looked cute, maybe even a little too cute, across the school cafeteria but one-on-one he twitched and trembled so much he made John think of a badly tuned hologram. John tried to draw but George was already ruined without his help. "I'll take a Polaroid," he thought, "in case I become a photographer." Reaching for the camera, he happened to notice the bed. No film. "Listen, I've got another idea," he said.
In bed George shut his eyes, went limp, and kind of squeaked, all of which were okay with John. He'd only had sex a couple of times, once standing up in a toilet stall, the other time with a guy about fifty who'd done all the work while he held his ass open. With George as a prop, he tried out a bunch of positions he'd seen in a porno film. He made a lot of mistakes, like it took him forever to get his cock hard enough to slip inside George's ass, but if George noticed or cared, it didn't show.
The next morning John's drawing teacher asked him to stay after class for a few minutes, waited until the room cleared, then announced that although John "quite rightfully" liked to let his "heavy artistry" speak for itself, he might use the platform of an upcoming assembly to "help enlighten ..." John tensed up. "No way," he thought. "In the words of the rock star Bob Dylan," the teacher concluded, eyeing John's clothes, "why not 'shovel a glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.' It'll count as a test."
From being a punk, John felt a slight pang of conscience. Punk's bluntness had edited tons of pretentious shit out of American culture, so, although John suspected that his work was nine-tenths pretentious shit, he tried to take the quote seriously, despite its has-been author. He agreed to the lecture idea, then spent a month taking notes and rewriting the notes until they didn't embarrass him. At dawn the day of the assembly he chewed on a pencil and tried to read what he'd written.
"Punk orders us to demystify everything in the world or we'll be doomed to a future so decadent, atomic bombs will seem just one more aftershave lotion and so on. What you seem to like in my drawings is how they reveal the dark underside, or whatever it's called, of people you wouldn't think were particularly screwed up. But you should know the real goal of my work is a Dorian Gray type of thing. I make you look awful, and I start to look really good. ..."
That afternoon he stood in front of the dimmed student body while slides of his portraits appeared on a giant screen over his head. He was planning to speak after thirteen or so. As he studied the mostly bored audience, he couldn't help but distinguish a few guys he'd drawn or still intended to draw scattered through the forgettables. He reread his speech, thought it sounded too much like he didn't know what he was saying, grabbed the microphone and blurted, "My portraits speak for themselves."
Afterward most of the teachers avoided him. Five students put out their hands. He scheduled a couple of sittings, then chucked his script into a wastebasket. He smoked a joint and was wondering what his work might actually say if, through some sort of miracle, its lips could move, when he stumbled on George vomiting in a rest room. "How did you like my talk?" John asked. "I didn't go," George replied, looking down at the mess he'd made. "I don't want to know what your work is about."
John drew a circle. He added two vertical lines, spaced several inches apart, to make a neck. Facial features appeared on the page as random shaky lines, fine as the hairs on a barbershop floor. They became lifelike through shading. That involved tilting the pencil then dragging it along the grain of the paper in various directions. Two sloppy ovals came next. John filled them with black blobby shapes that were meant to be pupils but could have been something he'd spilled on the page accidentally.
John studied the portrait, then George's face, then the portrait, and made the eyes look like caves. It looked more like an ad for some charity. He tried to erase the eyes. The paper tore. He threw the sketchpad aside. "George," he groaned, "let's get undressed." They lay on the bed and put their faces in each other's crotches. At one point John leaned back and made absolutely sure George was as cute as he'd thought a few minutes before, then he plunged in again.
He felt something that could have been love but was too manageable and kind of coldly interesting. It was more like he understood how love might feel. The sensation itself wasn't anywhere as disorienting as love was rumored to be. Actually it didn't feel that different from having completed a portrait, except George's skin felt so great. That was the weirdest part, feeling how warm and familiar George was and at the same time realizing the kid was just skin wrapped around some grotesque-looking stuff.
"Huh?" That was George's voice. John was about to say, "I didn't say anything," when come spurted into his mouth. "Jesus, George," he choked, "couldn't you warn me or something? I was figuring something important out. Shit." To keep from causing a scene he turned his back and sulked. Propped up against the far wall was the portrait of George side by side with a sketch of a previous subject. Even damaged, George's looked better. John scrambled out of bed, grabbed his sketchpad and started comparing the portrait with every other one he'd finished. "Hey," he muttered, "I've got an idea. Get dressed."
They headed for Dump, a poorly lit gay bar well known for its loose clientele. John dropped George off on a barstool, then felt his way along the walls, squinting. After a few rounds John spotted someone he liked slouched on a gray vinyl couch near the video games. The guy wore his hair in a shark fin straight down the top of his head. It looked as stiff as a saw. His eyes were outlined with mascara. His mouth dangled open. The button he'd pinned to his torn leather jacket read, I have many brains but I can't think.
John ordered George to sit down at one end of the couch, and took his place at the other. The punk tried to seem unimpressed by their cruising, but eventually he turned and glared at the worse offender. It took him an hour to stop calling John a fake punk, faggot, scum, asshole. ... George fell asleep. John feigned boredom until the punk started to nod out. Then he mentioned the drugs he had stashed in his bedroom. "Sounds good," the punk yawned. They made it home. After a few joints he said John could watch him jerk off.
John had the punk and George lie side by side on the bed. He crawled over their bodies while they masturbated, examining each in great detail and making comparisons. Below the neck they were just about even: smooth, washed-out, skeletal. Face-wise the punk wasn't much. His eyes were drab, his nose had been broken, his ears were caked with wax, his skull was shaped like an egg. He would have been nothing without punk. John sympathized at first. Then he realized he'd better not care or he'd never get hard enough.
He rolled George onto his stomach then climbed on top, tried to get his cock hard, couldn't, thought he could stuff it up George with his fingers but that didn't work so he rolled George back over and fucked his mouth. The punk sat a few feet off, watching them with a vacant expression that could have meant anything. John tried not to care but it attracted his eyes like a mirror. When he finally managed to come his concentration was so bad he missed George and got sperm all over everything. "Shit."
A few blocks away from John's parents' place there was a cobwebbed mansion that two generations of neighborhood kids had dubbed "the haunted house." It sat far back from the street. To reach it kids had to scale a brick wall, then wade through an acre of dried grass and faded newspapers. Until he was twelve, John was too overwhelmed by the words "haunted house" to check the place out. When he finally tiptoed inside one afternoon it was nothing, an empty thing. He'd spent a half hour picking up pieces of broken chairs, used prophylactics and smelly bums' clothing.
The morning after the three-way with George and the punk, John woke up from a nightmare in which that house happened to figure. "Hmm." He roused the boys, then suggested a field trip. The punk shrugged, staggered down the hall, came back with a can of John's mother's hairspray and started repairing his mohawk. George crawled out of bed. He was moving a little mechanically, as if afraid he would drop something. "So, did you sleep?" John asked. "Bad dreams," George squeaked, then shook his head back and forth to erase the word. "Actually, uh, well, last night was the first time I realized ... Oh, forget it."
As soon as they'd scaled the wall, John and George fucked in some bushes. The punk watched for a while, then he kicked them until they quit. All three collapsed on the steps of the house, dusty and spent as ghosts. John tried to tell them the story of how he'd discovered the place, but after a few minutes George strolled inside and started tapping the walls for possible secret compartments. The punk seemed more interested in the graffiti left over from earlier trespassers. He ran around scrawling the best on the backs of his hands with the tip of a burnt wooden match.
John ended up at a second-floor window, half listening to their racket. He watched a blond about eight years old ride his bike past the front of the grounds very fast. John imagined how frightened the kid would have been if he'd glanced up and spotted a male silhouette. Or had the world gotten so generally ugly and fucked up since he was a kid that a haunted house seemed kind of quaint? "If that's true," he thought aloud, "then so are my drawings. God, I can't think about this." He called the punk and George. The second they entered the room he ordered them to strip.
The punk punched a hole in the wall instead. George bit his nails. After glancing from John to the bloody fist about a dozen times he stumbled into the hall. John rolled his eyes, crossed his arms and tried to look like he meant what he'd said. The punk punched another hole, then another, then another, et cetera. John was deciding to leave when the punk paused, checked out the holes, which formed a crude five- or six-foot-square swastika, grinned for the first time that John could remember, and started hitting himself in the face and chest.
His belt rattled. It was a handful of bicycle chains twisted together and held in place with a rusty combination lock. Once in a while he'd quit hitting himself long enough to spin the dial a few times, squint, yell out some numbers, try the lock again, swear, and go back to hitting himself. John was mesmerized, the way he was when he did lots of weird combinations of drugs and felt like he could control other guys with his mind. In this case the cuts, bruises, scabs and blood smears made the punk look a bit like John's portraits.
The punk got his belt off, stripped naked, and threw himself onto a mattress that someone had left in one corner years back. "Hurt me," he yelled in a hoarse voice. "Fuck me up and I'll never forget you. I really fucking love violence. I want to tell all my friends what we did so they'll hate me or call me a fag or whatever, but fuck them. I'm not a poser like they are. I want to do everything so when I die they'll say I lived and tell bad jokes about me but who cares. I like getting crazy and you seem okay. Anyway, why not?"
John thought, "If my drawings could talk I bet they'd say something like that." "Okay," he said. He rolled up his sleeves and knelt over the punk's heaving back, fanning the B.O. away from his nose. He took a deep breath, then sank his teeth into the curve of one shoulder. "Leave a mark," the punk whispered. "Leave marks wherever you want. Make it memorable or whatever." This time John bit very hard. The skin still wouldn't break. "Try the back of my neck."
When John withdrew he saw some holes in the shape of an Xmas tree ornament. "That's it," he said. "I've got an idea. Get ready." The punk balled his fists. John bobbed his way down the back leaving bites in a regular pattern, four across, every few inches. Reaching the ass-slope he paused, massaged his sore jaw. The wounds were a really crass pink except the ones farther up, which had turned kind of violet. A few even leaked blood in long, thin strands that reminded him vaguely of tinsel.
He leaned back a few inches, spooked by the power of what he was doing. He tried to remember the name of the famous artist who'd shot himself and crawled across broken glass in his Jockey shorts. He couldn't. This seemed more original anyway. Doing horrible things to yourself was just me-generation angst shit from the seventies. A bleeding punk kid was so much more horrific and ridiculous and sort of moving too. Was that because of the Xmas connection? He thought suddenly of the pile of chains, smirked. "I'll make his ass a gift."
He pushed the punk's legs apart and adjusted them like an old TV antenna until the ass was roughly the shape of a box. Then he picked up the chains. Each lash left a red ribbon. He tried to aim, but the ribbons still came out too lopsided, so he had to make the whole area red. He was filling it in when the punk got impatient, rose up on his elbows and craned his neck to get a preview. First his eyes froze on something behind John. "It's the cops," he croaked.
It was George framed in the doorway, one hand clamped over his mouth. "Don't move," John said. George took off. John chased him downstairs and out the front door. Midway across the yard John grabbed George's shoulder, ripped a hole in the shirtsleeve and brought them both crashing down on a pile of old newspapers. "I want ... you to know ... that had nothing to do ... with us," he puffed. George struggled up to his feet, clutched his left knee and winced. He managed to say, "But I thought ...," then he hobbled away.
John wandered back to the room. It was empty. On the wall next to the mattress he found a fresh swatch of graffiti. Bill was here more or less. A trail of blood led from there to the door. John followed it down the hall. At its end he could just see the punk's silhouette shivering in the light coming through a smashed window. John accidentally stepped on a creaky board. The silhouette tensed, turned, broke a chunk of glass off what was left of the pane and held it out to John like broken glass was a gift.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Closer"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Dennis Cooper.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
JOHN: THE BEGINNER,
DAVID: INSIDE OUT,
GEORGE: THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY,
CLIFF: THE OUTSIDERS,
ALEX: THE REPLACEMENTS,
GEORGE: WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY,
PHILIPPE: MAKE BELIEVE,
STEVE: THE FOREFRONT,