From his acute sense of difference rooted in his illegitimacy, D Golden constructed a form of Nietzschean elitism to justify his isolation. (Always when considering the Golden men, one encounters the shadow of the übermensch.) “How should there be a ‘common good,’?” he quoted the philosopher in the Gardens. “The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.” This struck me as no more than youthful posing; just a few months older than he, I recognized in him my own weakness for philosophizing. D was in fact quite the striker of poses, a Dorian Gray type, slender, lissom, bordering on the effeminate. His self-image—that only he of all his tribe had the capacity for greatness, only he had the depth of character to plunge deeply into sorrow, that only he was rare—sounded pretty straightforwardly defensive in origin. But I had much compassion for him; he had been dealt a tough hand, and we all build our walls, do we not, and maybe we don’t even know what we are building them against, what force will finally storm them and destroy our little dreams.
I went with him sometimes to listen to music. There was a redheaded singer he liked called Ivy Manuel who did a weekly late-night set in a place on Orchard Street, sometimes wearing a tiara on her head to prove she was a queen. She sang cover versions of “Wild Is the Wind” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” and “Under the Bridge” before moving on to a few of her own, and D sitting in front of her at a little round black iron table closed his eyes and swayed to Bowie and Cohen and put his own words to the Chili Peppers under his breath. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t been born yet, sometimes I feel I don’t want to be born. Ivy Manuel was his friend because, he said—not joking—all the straight girls he met wanted to hit on him but Ivy was lesbian so they could actually have a friendship. He was the most beautiful of all those Goldens, as any magic mirror would readily have confirmed, and he could be the most beguiling of them too. All of us in the houses on the Gardens were victims of his wounded openness and in the larger neighborhood too he quickly became a figure. He professed to be disturbed by the attention. Everywhere I go people look at me, he said, there’s always someone looking, like I’m someone, like they expect something from me. Get over yourself, Ivy told him, nobody wants shit from you. He grinned and bowed his head in mock-apology. Charm was his disguise as it was Apu’s; beneath the surface he was brooding and often sad. From the beginning he was the one with the darkest darkness in him, even though he came into the world like sunshine, with a full head of white-blond hair. The hair darkened toward chestnut, and the skies of his character grew overcast also, there were frequent downward spirals into gloom.
Ivy didn’t make a big deal out of her sexuality, as a musician she didn’t like to hang labels on herself. “I have no problem being out, but I don’t think it has anything to do with my music,” she said. “I like who I like. I don’t want people to not listen to my music because of that and I don’t want people to listen to my music because of that.” But her audience was skewed heavily female, a lot of women plus the charming young man who didn’t want people to look at him, and me.
The Goldens all told stories about themselves, stories in which essential information about origins was either omitted or falsified. I listened to them not as “true” but as indications of character. The yarns a man told about himself revealed him in ways that the record could not. I thought of these anecdotes as card players’ “tells,” the involuntary gestures that give away a hand—the rubbing of the nose when the hand is strong, the fingering of an earlobe when it’s weak. The master player watches everyone at the table to discover their tells. This was how I tried to watch and listen to the Golden men. Yet one night when I went with D to the place on Orchard Street to hear Ivy Manuel sing Bowie’s ch-ch-ch-ch and Mitchell’s don’t-it-always-seem-to-go and an odd funny science-fiction song of her own called “The Terminator,” regarding the usefulness of time travel to potential saviors of the human race, and afterwards I sat drinking beers with the two of them in the empty venue, I missed the most obvious tell of all. I think it was Ivy who raised the increasingly complex subject of gendering, and D responded with a story from Greek mythology. Hermaphroditus was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite with whom a nymph named Salmacis fell so deeply in love that she begged Zeus to unite them forever, and so they became one, the two of them in a single body in which both sexes remained manifest. At the time I thought it was a way of saying how close he felt to Ivy Manuel, how they were joined forever as friends. But he was telling me stranger things and I didn’t know how to listen; things about himself.
The point about metamorphosis is that it’s not random. Philomela, assaulted by her brother-in-law Tereus, raped and with her tongue cut out, flew away from him as a nightingale, free, and with the sweetest singing voice. As in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, the gods permit that bodies be transformed into other bodies under the pressure of desperate needs—love, fear, liberation, or the existence within one body of a secret truth which can only be revealed by its mutation.
He carried three silver dollars in his pockets at all times so that he could cast the ancient Chinese hexagrams of divination. He cast one that night in the place on Orchard Street. Five unchanging broken lines and an unchanging unbroken one at the top. “Twenty-three,” he said, “it figures,” and put the coins away. I knew nothing about the I Ching, but later that night I googled the hexagrams. In the age of the search engine all knowledge is just a motion away. Hexagram 23 is named “Stripping,” and is described as the hexagram of splitting apart. Its inner trigram means “shake” and “thunder.”
“Let’s go home,” he said, and walked out on us without looking back.
I let him go. I don’t chase after people who indicate that they have had enough of my company. And maybe my own sensitivities got in the way of my understanding; because it was a long time before I thought, maybe there are reasons other than vanity, narcissism and shyness for his fear of being watched.
Always in the beginning some pain to assuage, some wound to heal, some hole to fill. And always at the end failure—the pain incurable, the wound not healed, the remnant, melancholy void.
To the question about the nature of goodness I asked at the very beginning of this narrative, I can at least give a partial answer: the life of the young woman who fell in love with Dionysus Golden one afternoon on a Bowery sidewalk and who stood by him and enfolded him in that unshakable love through everything that followed—that is, for me, one of the best definitions of a good life I have found in my own relatively brief, relatively parochial existence. “Le bonheur écrit à l’encre blanche sur des pages blanches,” Montherlant told us—happiness writes in white ink on a white page—and goodness, I’d add, is as elusive to pin down in words as joy. Yet I must try; for what these two found, and held on to, was nothing less than that—happiness created by goodness, and sustained by it, too, against extraordinary odds. Until unhappiness destroyed it.
From the day he first met her—she was wearing a white shirt and a black pencil skirt and smoking an unfiltered French cigarette on the sidewalk outside the Museum of Identity—he understood that there was no point trying to keep secrets from her, because she could read his mind as clearly as if there had been an illuminated series of news stories crawling across his forehead.
“Ivy said we should meet,” he said. “I thought it was a stupid idea.”
“Why did you come, in that case?” she said, turning her head away, looking bored.