Pathologies of the Après Garde: On Gary Indiana’s “Rent Boy”
Gary Indiana | Rent Boy | McNally Editions | January 2023 | 128 Pages
Among the many lately-rediscovered chroniclers of New York’s seamy fin de siècle, Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus. His subjects are the elder statesmen of waning movements, bohemian éminences grises unable or unwilling to accept their obsolescence—at least, when they’re not actively indulging it. His great theme is that particular tint of Weltschmerz experienced by the atomized specks of a moth-eaten avant garde. The state, or the fear, of being outmoded, haunts his early novels, casting a carbon-rich smog over their proceedings. As the nameless narrator of Gone Tomorrow observes, “There is no anger more pointless than that of people left behind.”
It’s not simply about being out-earned, out-written, out-classed, and it’s not simply a matter of aging, though Indiana’s narrators are typically a few years past the acme of youth. There’s an erotic dimension to this forsakenness; impotent anger calcifies into dread, at the heart of which is a fear of losing love, of never being lovable again. At the back of it, however—like a leaden slab of anxiety against which Indiana’s characters are framed—looms the AIDS crisis. Though it’s rarely figured clearly in Indiana’s early novels, the fear of obsolescence often suggests not only individual death, but total extinction; in other words, it metonymizes the experience of watching one’s contemporaries—lovers, friends, and enemies alike—disappear in waves. There are, as a character in Gone Tomorrow puts it, two possible fates awaiting Indiana’s protagonists, “either death or an endless piling-on of losses until one’s entire context, the whole human frame of reference that had made one’s life what it was, ha[s] been erased line by line, down to a blank slate facing nothingness.”
Despite this, or because of it, day-to-day life is figured as an emotional burlesque, taking place beneath a much-crazed lacquer of performance. With the impossibility of authenticity and irony alike suffusing the downtown art world milieu where Indiana’s characters strut and fret their quindecimal allotments on the stage, his narrators are saved (if they’re saved at all) by their almost preternatural clear-sightedness. Their lucidity functions as a safe-guard against what, in a critical essay on the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, Indiana calls “the cycle of limitless seduction by limitless production.” This shrewdness—a sort of hard-boiled, gimlet-eyed pose—lends Indiana’s novels an essayistic quality; his characters, in their questing disposition and abrasive objectivity, seem to model a way of being in the (modern) world that approaches a state of perpetual critique. Snark, you sense, is holy here; to sneer is to survive.
Most of the time, anyway. Rent Boy, originally released in 1994 and reissued this year by McNally Editions, feels like a bit of an outlier in this sense, and in Indiana’s oeuvre writ-large. A tongue-in-cheek crime caper that gingerly glosses the themes of his two previous novels, 1989’s Horse Crazy and 1993’s Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book, self-consciously tossed-off. Think of it as Indiana’s Sanctuary, a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler with far fewer (blessedly: zero) corncob cameos.
Still, there’s something barbed and gnarled about Rent Boy. As ever with Indiana, an ambient dread thrums below the surface of the prose, the fluorescent glare of an ersatz modernity casting sickly highlights onto everything it touches. The book’s artists, we sense, are failures not necessarily because they lack talent or vision (though that certainly helps) but because something is rotten in the chain of cultural production itself—every work of art is too quickly absorbed into the system for anything like an avant garde to properly mature.
This slippage, a kink in the process of canon-forming, is present, too, in the sphere of self-fashioning. The book’s protagonist is Danny, or Mark, or something else entirely—he switches it up based on locale, client, and other determining factors, though there’s a playfulness to this evasion as well, and by the end of the book it’s clear we haven’t been granted access to his real name (for the sake of convenience I’ll stick with Danny). At the Emerson Club, a semi-posh, self-awarely “hip” restaurant frequented by the literati and arterati and whoever else seems to matter—and where, during the day, Danny works as a bartender—he goes by the name Mark, a patina of class being called for, naturally. With his friend Bruce he’s Billy, a lighter sobriquet for a lighter, more buoyant self. That this nominal capering should, at least in part, arise out of the need for self-preservation isn’t surprising, nor does it seem wrong to ascribe some part of it to the giddiness, the soul-level flexibility of youth. Less obvious, maybe, is the extent to which Danny’s name-switching is a method of exerting control, a play for power—an almost tantric denial of identity that, occasionally, seems to go too far.
You can sense this elsewhere in Rent Boy, a flirtation with the hazardous zone where self-aggrandizement slurs into a rancid asceticism. Danny is studying architecture at Rutgers, and his two biggest timesucks—studying and prostitution—circle each other and occasionally meet. The history of whoredom in particular occupies a niche in the novel. “The Hagia Sophia was built by the fourth Roman emperor, Justinian, in honor of his wife, Theodora, who happened to be a big whore,” we’re told. “You have to be a pretty big whore to get any type of monument built to you these days.” Which, on Danny’s part, isn’t for lack of trying. Danny spends hours at the gym, “pumping lats and abs and pecs, checking out [his] magnificent form in the wall mirrors, gulping down electrolyte Kool-Aid and carbo coolers,” imagining what his potential clients might see. “Nothing’s worse than a pimple, or that scrambled look you get from a hangover, everything has to be flawless… like it’s a living room johns can walk into and get comfortable in.” (Ketosis being, as any real gym rat will tell you, only one letter away from kenosis.)
Treating the body as a space like any other—to be entered and exited, relaxed in or rummaged through, renovated or remodeled or simply trashed and torn down—is, in one of those surprisingly touching about-faces Indiana is so good at, more a meditative act than anything else. “I think a lot about the spaces people spend time in, even if I can’t express it in writing,” Danny explains. At other times, the metaphor of space allows for a certain numbing, making the habitual bearable. Of a client who likes to engage in coprophilia, watching Danny jerk himself off or else masturbating himself “with shit all over his fingers,” we’re told that “it’s bizarre how easy it is, getting used to scenes like that, once you know what the client wants and it’s all established you just walk through it like an old dressing room.”
When he’s not working at the Emerson Club or turning tricks, Danny goes for walks with friends, attends salacious dinner parties, feels down, denies he’s feeling down, keeps going. Indiana’s characters, for the most part, are fundamentally burnt out; their modus vivendi is terminal boredom. A sense of inarticulable mental and physical exhaustion plagues them, as though experience has been taken to its furthest point—as though, deep down, reality itself has been played out. Danny, prone to depressive moods, is frequently overwhelmed by the claustric feeling that “no matter what you do or how you try to prove yourself there’s always something holding your head underwater.”
With friends like his, who wouldn’t cop to feeling this way? The novel’s dramatis personae is stocked with precisely the sort of amphetamized ghouls you’d expect, including a photographer, alias Bruce the Pooch, who shoots food spreads for magazines, employing various gross-out materials and tricks in the process, from clear nail polish applied to the back of a Christmas turkey “to give the skin exactly the right sheen,” to (when a plate of chocolate fudge with walnuts is needed) the narrator’s freshly deposited turd. There are sour lancings of real-world figures, e.g. “that tub-of-lard painter that did the broken plates years ago,” while other characters seem grotesque composites—for instance, Sandy, a pretentious novelist and provocateur who seems like a cross between Kathy Acker and Camille Paglia, and whose books, for all their depravity, Danny finds aggressively passé. “It was all my cunt this and my cunt that for two hundred pages, stick your big dick in my cunt sort of stuff,” he explains. “But literary, you know.” Most prominently, there’s Chip, the narrator’s friend and (functionally off-limits) sexual obsession du jour, who looks a little bit “the way Tony Danza used to look on Taxi, before he got all fat-assed and bullnecked.” Chip, twenty-five, has been a rent boy for nearly a decade when the novel opens, which is just about long enough. “Chip has always got a scheme that will get him out of whoring, once and for all,” Danny explains, “only he doesn’t know shit about anything besides what people want in bed and these plans always fall through.”
A rude glamor radiates from the book’s prose. Throughout, the tone of the writing is punchy, clipped, tabulating, while a certain filmic campiness jazzes up its descriptions. Violence is comic, off-handed, decidedly abrupt. When a student in Danny’s architecture class is denied a prize and shoots up the department, including the student who did receive the prize, the information is relayed in a playful cascade of prose. (Danny, in high comic fashion, is late for class and just misses the shooting.) “Oh, the guy shot himself after he wasted the others,” he notes. “It was prize or nothing for him, evidently. I’m not that way, but I can view it in a certain sympathetic light.” This lightness of touch is only a step away—or a bad lay away—from cruelty. Wylie, a client who “likes to play dead,” lying there “like a vast white worm that splits in half at the bottom,” is dealt one of the book’s brisker descriptions. “I swear it’s like death in there because Wylie has, like, no reaction,” Danny writes. “Even when he’s a little shitty down there the shit smells cold like something metallic instead of shit.”
Indiana’s easygoing syntax—the slippery, casual asyndeton that feels at once half-slangy and half-clinical—isn’t so much naturalistic as anthropological. But self-awareness, like an erection, is hard to keep up indefinitely, and the book’s gestures can at times feel tired, strung-out. Consider Ricky Chester, who, the narrator notes, “has the biggest, blackest dick I’ve ever seen, which believe me is saying something.” There’s something sophomoric and simple about the joke here—it’s gratuitous in the old sense: added on. Much better is the description given of Ricky a page later: “The way he moved, you could picture some bent-over guy’s ass sucking in Ricky’s prick with an aria of little farts.”
The plot of Rent Boy doesn’t really get cooking until almost halfway through the book. It turns out that Chip has become ensnared in an organ-harvesting scheme run by one Guy Crashnitz, a doctor and one-time client turned general benefactor. Crashnitz, we learn, invented an immunosuppression cocktail that drastically increases the viability of organ transplants. There’s an easy irony here, the way the cocktail’s effects grimly mimic the symptoms of AIDS, though Indiana doesn’t overplay it. It sits there, resting at the center of the book’s noisy plot, a neutral reminder of how ridiculous and base contemporary reality has become—that immunosuppressed gay men should be dying off left and right, while Crashnitz fills his coffers selling blackmarket kidneys to the fabulously rich and death-averse.
Crashnitz’s crew is an ad hoc assemblage of campy tropes—the oversexed bombshell Mavis Montgomery, who, previous to her life of crime, “danced topless at the Baby Doll Lounge and some other venues in the business district,” and the butler-cum-strongman Stanley, possessed of “that Eddie Constantine or Lionel Stander type of rough-hewn, burly quality.” Their mark is a Mr. Lindner, the head of a “genetic-engineering consortium,” a married professional who just happens to frequent La Esqualita and Sally’s II, two “drag places in the Forties.” Paranoia grows as the plan comes closer to fruition. Danny is nervous about Chip’s involvement, concerned that something darker is afoot—namely, that the crew might have designs on Danny and Chip’s own internal assets. Chip, like Gregory Burgess in Horse Crazy, is lacking something vital, a survival instinct; in protecting him and worrying over his whereabouts, Danny begins to lose something of his own pep. “I felt… unbelievably tired,” he writes. “Tired to the point where I could no longer protect myself from reality, if that makes any sense.”
Besides offering up another thematic parallel—as Mavis points out, “it’s a regular industry, people selling parts of their own bodies for food money,” something Danny probably doesn’t have to be reminded of—the crime interlude allows Indiana to indulge in some zany descriptions and theatrical set pieces, all while further limning Danny’s depressive spiral. And yet, it’s precisely here that the two strains of the novel pull apart. On the one hand, there’s the heightened reality of the parody, which has Mavis, “with a certain fuck-it-all bravado,” downing a glass of Jack Daniels and succumbing to a paroxysm of campy gestures: “She thwacks the glass down on her napkin and zaps Stanley with her movie star smile and a little shake to her bosoms.” On the other, there’s the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed:
I can tell you what the cocktail lounge at the Ramada’s like, think of dark Formica and grainy indirect lighting and emotions collecting in front of you in the little puddles formed by your cocktail glass, islands and continents of feelings you don’t know how to place any more, and voices, the so-called human element, that remind you you’re chained to the earth by a million little details: the world has fancy intellectual names for all these manacles and torture devices holding you down, but they might as well be called Mavis and Stanley and Chip, or the boy who ran away from home to learn fear, or the boy you love beyond anything who brings you a souvenir from his trip to Easter Island with the one he wants to fuck instead of you, or just a client whose loneliness and despair jut out on his face in the seconds before he comes: to me they were faces scribbled in watercolor drooling down the window, drizzling into Eighth Avenue and puddling up with all the human wreckage stashed in waterlogged corners of construction scaffolds.
Call it a curse, though it’s surely a compliment, too—reading Rent Boy, you get the sense that Indiana is simply too much of an intellectual to write a true potboiler. The book’s intellectual and camp-adjacent elements prove sadly immiscible; the resulting pastiche is sloppy, the novel’s two sensibilities remaining overpure and bleeding into one another with an awkward vibrancy. Either Indiana doesn’t recognize there’s a difference between the book’s foundational sensibilities (unlikely), or he hasn’t taken the time to determine the points at which they might fruitfully intermingle (slightly more likely), or he’s simply having too much fun with both of them separately to worry about anything so humdrum as syncretization (most likely). That’s all well and good—this is, to use the Greenian yardstick, an entertainment after all—though we’re left with one great casualty, namely, the novels’ crime plot, which remains decidedly undercooked. Indiana shows little interest in the mechanics of the genre. Despite Danny’s much-professed suspicions, there’s little in the way of an actual investigation; revelations tend to simply fall into his lap.
Eventually Danny, his conscience pricked, confesses the whole scheme to Lindner, who doesn’t believe him and ends up getting kidnapped anyway. His attempted betrayal is no big deal, Danny’s informed, though not super convincingly. He’s right to be skeptical, we learn when he arrives back at his apartment one night to find the door slightly ajar:
The first thing I see is HA HA HA splashed across the wall in real jumpy-looking red letters, like they were swabbed on there with a mop. The next thing I see is the bridal veil from Chip’s wedding outfit lying on the floor, I didn’t recognize it right away, but there was wind coming in the front windows that ruffled it, and then I saw Chip, after I stepped into the room, because he was propped up against the wall beside the door, he was naked, and something had torn him open from his neck to his belly and pulled his ribs apart so the middle of him looked like a carcass in a slaughterhouse. And his… genitals had been sliced off and stuffed in the cavity so the head of his dick stuck out of this rip in his lower abdomen.
Certain abysmal practicalities beckon—Chip is promptly chopped to bits in the bathtub, his disarticulated limbs stuffed into garbage bags, his beauty rudely discomposed. Danny, fearing for his life, ends up in Guadalajara, whence, we discover, he’s been drafting his missives to J., who anyway might not be reading them, might not care, might not even be real. (That J. is a writer figure adds a frisson of plausible deniability to the writing; if there’s something compositionally sloppy about Rent Boy, it’s your fault for noticing, for deigning to care. Danny never wanted to be a writer, just to fuck one.)
Washed-up or failed artists, a dime a dozen in Indiana’s other novels, aren’t as prominent as you might expect in Rent Boy. Part of that’s a result of the particular subculture the novel deals with—rather than the world of artists and art critics, or a circle of actors and filmmakers, Rent Boy is about a different type of labor (though not necessarily, as Danny’s narration makes clear, a less intellectualized one)—and part of it feels intentional, as though Indiana wanted a break from his habitual obsessions. Strangely enough, in this void, Chip’s crucifixion comes on like the Christmas Oratorio cranked to eleven and with production values Andrew Lloyd Webber would salivate over—the whole kit and caboodle, with neon-lit angels and tinsel-strung trumpets und so weiter. Which is to say, it feels like the one real work of art in the novel: a nasty vision, stark and haunting and needlessly cruel, but a vision nonetheless.