I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

Overview

A beloved memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature—whose graphic, funny, and caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments.

"[Indiana] becomes the connective tissue that binds together a diaspora of subcultures: the beatnik-era experimental writing and happenings of downtown New York, the 1960s co-opted counterculture gone awry, the punk movement that followed, and the art and intellectual circles of the Reagan 80s, when the AIDS crisis was wiping out a generation of young gay men like him." —Los Angeles Times

With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he lived and worked occasionally over the past decades.

Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847847228
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	09/08/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

GARY INDIANA is a novelist and critic who has chronicled the despair and hysteria of America in the late twentieth century. From Horse Crazy (1989), a tale of feverish love set against the backdrop of downtown New York amid the AIDS epidemic, to Do Everything in the Dark (2003), "a desolate frieze of New York's aging bohemians" (n+1), Indiana's novels mix horror and bathos, grim social commentary with passages of tenderest, frailest desire. With 1997's Resentment: A Comedy, Indiana began his true crime trilogy, following up with Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999) and Depraved Indifference (2002). Together, the three novels show the most vicious crimes in our nation's history to be only American pathologies personified. In 2015, Indiana published his acclaimed anti-memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love and later the novel Gone Tomorrow. Called one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today" by the London Review of Books, "the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society" by Jamaica Kincaid, and "one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche" by the Guardian, Gary Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

Read an Excerpt

I Can Give You Anything But Love

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By Gary Indiana

Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 Gary Indiana
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4722-8

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CHAPTER 1

This afternoon Abdul showed up at my apartment on Calle 21 y G. In the door's judas eye I made out a sweat-beaded face from an old photo, scarily close and unexpected, like a sea monster humping a periscope. At first I couldn't tell if he was Abdul or another mulatto who boned me a few times a thousand years ago, when the skin market assembled at night by the Fiat garage on the Malecón. The other guy went loco the summer a drug shipment slipped past the coast guard and flooded Havana with cocaine. Before that, even a little weed was a shrieking rarity. By September, jineteros were burgling houses for coke money and banging clients in apartment-house doorways.

After an inevitable crackdown, gay rights groups in El Norte denounced the Castro regime's repressive measures. The Castro regime can piss up a rope, but some repressive measures are understandable. Nightlife shifted up La Rampa and the hustlers took over the cafeteria at 23 y G, a block from where I am now. Then when I was away for seven years the scene trickled back to the Malecón. The Bim Bom cafeteria at La Rampa and Infante is homo central these days. The old Fiat dealership has become a spruced-up café serving breakfast at sidewalk tables.

I wouldn't want to see the cokehead again. I didn't feature seeing Abdul much, either. I don't like people showing up here uninvited. It's important to maintain boundaries. Besides that, Abdul is a pig. A harmless pig, but a pig all the same. I thought to keep the barred security door between us, then realized it wasn't locked.

"I saw you last night at Bim Bom," he said, flicking the door latch and slipping into the salon. He attempted a hug. I slid out of reach and steered him out to the terrace.

"I followed you up here," he proudly revealed, "but it was dark."

I wasn't sure what he meant by that, exactly. People like Abdul have eyes that see in the dark with the accuracy of night-vision goggles. For that matter, they could pick up your location anywhere in Havana as if your wallet was sending a GPS signal. Some would mistake this for tropical exuberance run awry. Worse, people like Abdul expect congratulations for raping your privacy.

Abdul is an attractive man, now in his thirties. In the US or Europe, he could model underpants for Calvin Klein. There is nothing overtly crass or desperate about him. Still, in days of old, he was full of crude calculation, an annoying self-assurance that emanated from his prick. That hadn't changed, either.

"Why not say something instead of following me?"

He strode to the edge of the terrace and pointed to the Parque Victor Hugo across from the Romanian embassy.

"I would have! A police stopped me, over there."

Like all Havanans, Abdul refers to law enforcement officers using the indefinite article, as one speaks of an invasive plant species.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana. Copyright © 2015 Gary Indiana. Excerpted by permission of Rizzoli International Publications, 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.

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Editorial Reviews

"Beautifully written, Gary Indiana’s ‘memoir’ is one of his greatest books: a heartbreaking, astringently accurate account of the tidal shifts between the American 20th and 21st centuries. Indiana is one of the smartest, most truthful writers living today." —Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and After Kathy Acker

"Gary Indiana's memoir is written with both laconic distance and a sense of urgency. It is comic and then almost melancholy. He can create memorable characters and dramatic moments in stylish sentences that seem effortless. But, more than anything, this book is a display of a personality that is sardonic and sharp, fiercely intelligent, vulnerable and original." —Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island

"I Can Give You Anything but Love recounts the wicked adventures of old Gary in Cuba and young Gary living dangerously in the demimondes of LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, in prose so conversant and apt it’s like a superpower, like ease in a foreign element, breathing underwater or flying. Fueled by Swiftian indignation at our unbelievable stupidity, accuracy is a kind of revenge on a world that declines to return our love. Young Gary suffers the opposite of an education: he unlearns till all that remains is chaos and invisibility. He respects beautiful flesh and friendship’s damaged utopia as he encounters others who are also desperate, brilliant, and sometimes famous." —Robert Glück, author of About Ed 

"Gossipy and acerbic, raunchy and unsentimental, I Can Give You Anything but Love defies the conventional moods and gestures of memoir to give us a portrait of the young man who will become Gary Indiana: one of the most gifted, most uncompromising writers of our era." —Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One

From the Publisher

2015-06-28
A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and artist recalls his past. In this ironically titled memoir, Indiana (Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, 2010, etc.) gives little evidence of love but much graphic detail of sex, focused often on comparative penis sizes and tumescence. Although he claims to have "an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance," being "too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone's life, including my own," his voice throughout tends to be supercilious. Indiana characterizes his parents as "emotionally constipated," creating an environment that prepared him "for absolutely nothing." Growing up within "a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol," any problem, he was taught, "was other people's fault." Early sexual experiences with boys left him believing that "sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality." In his 20s, he was subject to panic attacks and depression; pickups did not fulfill his "pinching wish for attachment." In late-1960s California, Indiana "lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into," usually connected to his friend Ferd, a political activist and porno filmmaker. In those years, writes the author, psychedelic drugs "were taken like aspirin…and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more ‘seriously' troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts." Ferd often sent him to emergency rooms to steal syringes, errands he performed with alacrity. Later, living in Cuba, the author had an affair—"a complete pornographic fantasy"—with a sexually energetic deaf mute, a relationship he quickly found "tiresome." Among those singled out for scorn is Susan Sontag: arrogant, "exasperating," a woman whose "chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses." David Lynch was humorless, boring, and "smarmy." Indiana remarks that his memories are "colored by mood and contingency." The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter, and sad.

Kirkus Reviews