Sam D’Allesandro wasn’t his real name—he wore that ironic badge of identity with a disarming, take-it-or-leave-it grin—but it wasn’t until after he died that I found out he had been born Richard Anderson. Surely the plainest name of an American author ever? At his Hugo Street apartment, after his funeral, as parents and family showed us pictures of him growing up on the farm, and so forth, they kept talking about “Richard” this and “Richard” that, and I must have looked bewildered enough that Fritz Schultz took me aside and whispered, “Sam’s real name was Richard.” Last month Sean Monohan showed me a series of drivers’ licenses he keeps in a box, more pictures of Sam, with the name Richard Anderson eventually dying out, circa age 23. And the name “Sam D’Allesandro” taking over, supplanting the birth-name, the other discarded names. And always the photos on the licenses radiant and luscious—he might have been modeling for Bruce Weber. So that when he decided to try to model and for some reason no photographer could really capture his beauty, he was disappointed, of course. It’s odd that there are people who are counter-photogenic, who look better in life than on film.
With a stricken look, Sam would confide that he had been born the son of the ’70s Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro, and I believed him, though something about the chronology didn’t gibe. Later on, in Los Angeles, this claim backfired, when a press listing of a reading he gave at Beyond Baroque, the nonprofit arts center in Venice, alluded to this famous dad and the phone rang and Benjamin Weissman picked up the phone. Who knew that the real Joe lived a few miles away, very much alive, very much ready to chew poor Ben a new asshole? Uh-oh! Maybe Sam identified with Joe Dallesandro’s working-class values, his diamond-in-the-rough appeal, his “teenage integrity,” or his sheer sex allure? Joe played the addict, the hustler, the stud, the ambisexual whose lack of affect had its own powerful effect—Sam did too.
When one met Sam, he proffered this fake name as if only he and you were in on the joke, as a shortcut to intimacy. Another part of him wanted to be famous, so he could get to meet and know as equals his idols—Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Jean Genet, Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Laura Nyro, Willem de Kooning, Dory Previn, David Bowie, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Kathy Acker, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen. Did he ever meet any of them? I don’t believe he did, but such was his tact that I don’t really know. The dedication of Slippery Sins (Sam’s 1983 book of poetry) reads “This is for Fritz and for Patti.” Over the Internet I once bought a copy of Slippery Sins which Sam had inscribed to Yoko Ono—“I’ve been wishing you love for fifteen years”—but she must get hundreds of fanboy books a year. I wonder.
But anyway, he did get to meet us—the prose writers of San Francisco who were busy working on a “New Narrative,” a community-based project in which we hoped to recuperate narrative from the trap of modernism by rearticulating it as a postmodern conceptual art, wise to the precepts of Language poetry. We took Sam to our hearts, and learned of his potential quick, thanks to the untiring efforts of the late Steve Abbott, who was the real live wire, who always knew which way the wind was blowing. Immediately Sam took up the pose of a besieged Nijinsky fending off the imperious advances of Diaghilev. (Steve, Sam told us, wanted to spank his ass with a slab of bacon. And you know, it did sort of sound like something Steve would want to do.) Yet Sam depended on Steve, and took to his teenage daughter Alysia as well. After Sam’s death, Steve did a thoughtful job of editing The Zombie Pit for Crossing Press (1989), when they had a brief fling with publishing “gay fiction.” It’s been out of print for nearly fifteen years and Sam’s executors, myself among them, are supergrateful to Suspect Thoughts Press for picking up the slack and to you, of course, for reading this new edition.
I first met Sam in the late summer of 1983, when Bryan Monte introduced me to him after their reading at Intersection, in those days a top artist-run space in San Francisco. Sam’s book Slippery Sins had appeared, and its potential intrigued me although I disliked the poetry. That is, it seemed like performance poetry. Later, he said he had taken the performance texts he had written and performed, and chopped them up so they’d look like poetry, but he’d also written some “real” poems. Over the years, with the encouragement of his longtime friend and former lover Fritz Schultz, Sam’s work grew in power and authority. If the too-beautiful poems of Slippery Sins were vague about sex, vague about gender and class, the prose he started to write now broke these boundaries down—flattened them out, in a series of bulldozing maneuvers, risky with their enormity. His writing became “edgy,” edgy enough to match his personality. His willingness to revise, his attempts to improve every sentence, became clear.
He would rewrite a paragraph endlessly, often with mixed results. Even if it was “perfect,” he might throw it away. I imagine he did the same thing with his attitudes, his feelings, with the various lives he led. This creation, revision, perfection, and dismissal links his work in a mysterious way to God’s, or what I imagine is God’s. His stories attempt a religious philosophy they don’t achieve, for what actuates them is his own desire, then its absence. His book comes to us as a phallocentric model of writing, the power and the exhaustion endlessly renewable. It’s no accident, I suppose, that each story seemed less like a rewrite of his last than a mirror image of it. “In my work,” he wrote, “I am not wanting to add to something or generate more, rather I am stripping the subject down to its itsness...a core, that which is beyond a surface, the core from which the surface emanates.” Like the director Robert Bresson he had no use for characters per se; he preferred “models.”
Some Textual Notes
“Nothing Ever Just Disappears” appeared in the third issue of No Apologies, which I edited as Bryan Monte’s guest. George Stambolian read it there and asked for Sam’s address, eventually securing its reprint for his influential anthology Men on Men (New American Library, 1986). When Bryan moved to the East Coast, I began a magazine called Mirage and invited Sam to contribute a story. He sent me “Electrical Type of Thing,” which he envisaged as a counterpart to Dennis Cooper’s “My Mark” and Bob Glück’s “Sex Story.” The following issue of Mirage was dedicated to the Black Mountain poet John Wieners, and after studying Wieners’ early masterpiece The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), Sam channeled John Wieners’ mournful energy into “All I Want Is to Die Famous,” a lurid exposé of the last days of the starlet Carol Wayne.
At this point Sam’s work became more complex and ambitious (and lengthy). After rejection by several other magazines, “My Day with Judy” appeared in the third issue of Mirage. In the last year of Sam’s life, his story “Jane and Sam” was published in Yellow Silk, and a condensed version of “The Zombie Pit” in Zyzzyva.
Sam and I met only rarely. I retain, however, an indelible picture of his looks, reinforced by the skill with which he was able to make them one of the central themes of his writing. I’ve known three or four writers with more glamour, and two or three with more sex appeal—but Sam’s personal beauty was astonishing. At first it formed a screen behind which one could hardly see his work. One afternoon he came over to visit and we watched the John Huston film Reflections in a Golden Eye. Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. (On a then-new VCR; funny to think they’re so ubiquitous now, but back then people would make dates to see one.) In a just world, I thought, Taylor and Brando would be sitting in my living room watching Sam and me on the screen. We decided to collaborate on a story, “My Fine Feat Hered Friend,” which began with great gusto and then it sort of petered out, as you’ll see.
Dodie Bellamy and Sam exchanged a series of letters under the aliases “Mina Harker” and “Sam X,” and years later Dodie published both sides of the correspondence in a book called Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and San D’Allesandro (Talisman House, 1994, and still in print), together with Sam’s very last story, “Travels with My Mother,” which Dodie painstakingly transcribed from an audio cassette made two months before his death. Dodie wrote:
In this piece we get to hear the writer’s process, constructing a fiction out of available facts and time. The tape is spliced often, as the voice breaks in with new, undeveloped thought, always to improve the story, to take it in new directions, to reveal or confine or conflate—I’ve surrounded these breaks with parentheses for clarity. Thus there’s a “you” in the story unlike the usual second person, a heroic “you” hounded both by HIV and by the narrative imperative. Although AIDS isn’t mentioned in “Travels with My Mother,” it haunts the piece like a revenant, right down to the sudden faint that “ends” the story in a comic shadow of death itself. The story impinges on itself, as I imagine the virus impinges on the subject of the body.
The tape is hard to listen to, and try to imagine as you read it that he is producing it for you breath by breath, fainter and fainter, and then it ends, tape hissing, no more voice, no voice left.
When Steve Abbott edited The Zombie Pit, he collected the six stories previously published in periodicals, and printed for the first time the brief pieces “Lenny,” “1960,” “Walking to the Ocean This Morning,” the travelogue “14 Days,” and a version of the unfinished novella, “Giovanni’s Apartment.”
Basically the present volume contains all the stories of The Zombie Pit, plus “Travels with My Mother” from Real, and adds the prose versions of a few pieces Sam had published earlier, with line breaks somewhat arbitrarily inserted, to turn them into “poems,” in his book of poetry Slippery Sins—“Jimmy,” “Speedboys,” and “The Wild Creatures.”
I worked from the manuscripts in Sam’s archive, which Sean Monohan made available to me. Out of the notebooks, I transcribed a few more stories—the brief “Teddy Kennedy,” and the coming-of-age memoir slash fiction “How I Came to Dinosaur Pond,” and “our” story, “A Fine Feat Hered Friend.” There’s also a marvelous dream journal which I don’t print here, because, well, it’s not really story material. I wanted just one book with all the stories in it, and this is the one for me.
Personally I took great interest in Sam’s development because it seemed to me, at that time, that we were experiencing another “San Francisco Renaissance,” new narrative subdivision. My own work seemed inextricably tied to that of Bob Glück, Bruce Boone, Dodie Bellamy, Sam D’Allesandro, Steve Abbott, Carla Harryman, Francesca Rosa, Marsha Campbell, Camille Roy, and a bit afield Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Brad Gooch, and many others. We were all in this “thing” together. It was like a physical element, a fog, or a thicket. Or like Soup, the name of Steve Abbott’s New Narrative magazine. I can hardly expand on that any further without getting sentimental.
The last year of Sam’s life I never saw him, once; as his beauty crumbled and the facial wasting set in, he became a recluse, methodically trying to finish his last pieces. I worked out later that he just plain didn’t want to be seen. Finally, in an abrupt change of policy, Sam agreed to see the photographer Robert Giard, who brought his camera into the darkened apartment and took the photos of Sam, all emaciated and rickety, that years later appeared in Giard’s book, Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers (MIT Press, 1998). When he got sick, Sam wrote in a letter to me:
“I’m terminal and that seems to make me important, no longer answerable for my bills or attitudes; my refused meals a sign of increasing power; withdrawal, a symptom of bravery. No one will say so, but I’m terminal. I don’t care about politics or the old lovers I’d wanted to see on my deathbed. I’ve forgotten the meaning of everything except my medication. Buried beneath layers of thin tissue, a refugee on a field of darkness, I am isolated, confused, as white noise fills my ears. Only the world inside my imploding body is real, like watching on film as I disintegrate. I clap my hands at this new game that already bores me. I’m a pumpkin caving in, in a tunnel without return that grows narrower all the time.”
Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a book of poetry, Argento Series, two novels, Shy and Arctic Summer, a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows, and two books of stories, Little Men and I Cry Like a Baby. For the San Francisco Poets Theater, Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (with Barbara Guest). His next book will be all about Kylie Minogue.
Go to the The Wild Creatures webpage.
Go to the Kevin Killian webpage.
Go to the Sam D'Allesandro webpage.
Read "Bringing Back Sam"
an interview with Kevin Killian at the Bay Area Reporter.
Listen to a podcast on The Writers Block at KQED:
Kevin Killian reads "Nothing Ever Just Disappears."
Read the story "Electrical Type of Thing."
"Introduction" from The Wild Creatures:
Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro
© 2005 Kevin Killian
