Among the skills that can get a writer out of trouble, a sense of smell should not be underestimated. Stuck for an escape, cornered by the rats of cliché and sentimentality, today’s autofictionists are wont to brandish their anxiety, consort with their inner demons, flash their self-loathing and blame late capitalism — yet a nimbler response might simply be to sniff for fresh air and head for the door.
These days, it is often the memoirist (Noé Álvarez, Jane Bertch) who seems more powerfully attached to the idea of sensual delight as a point of departure. This general upgrade in the importance of the five senses may have Proustian bearings, but for some life-writers the question is really about how to survive what we recall.
Guy Trebay, a cultural critic and a reporter for the Style section of The New York Times, happens to be a sensualist so native to the task that his expertly perfumed memoir might easily have been sponsored by Guerlain.
We learn that at suppertime in his Long Island childhood, his mother would routinely dab herself with Shalimar before his father got home from work. In a slightly later part of the author’s life, whirling in otherness amid the beautiful freaks, dropouts and freedom-chasers in late-1960s Manhattan, he would occasionally fetch up at the Chelsea Hotel suite of the designer Charles James, a man of style and squalor who would cover the reek caused by his incontinent beagle with frequent spritzes of Habit Rouge.
Trebay has always been a slave to what we might call the olfactory sublime, and with good reason: His father enjoyed a short-lived success as the inventor of a “groovy” men’s cologne called Hawaiian Surf, “for the use of manly descendants in spirit, of a special breed of adventurer.”
In the era of Old Spice and Hai Karate — “a cologne so primitive in its approach to seduction” that “it came with printed instructions for fighting off women driven mad by the scent” — his glamorous father seemed to Trebay both fantastical and absent. As the son elegantly tells it, the whole family was wrapped in invention, going way back, existing “as little more than a collection of scattered genetic puzzle pieces.”
Searching for photographs, he learns that the big house his grandparents had appeared to own in upstate New York was actually a place in which they’d worked as servants. Images survive of them posing in fancy cars, then of his handsome parents, on the North Shore, appearing for a time fully occupied by their own happiness. “Fortified by a seemingly invincible glamour,” he writes, “they had somehow failed to envision situations in which things did not work out.”
In this Gatsbyesque picture of bright delusion, it is understandable that Trebay began to dream of his own life in Manhattan, a place at that time where the chosen, star-struck few could float with detachment on the Warholian ether.
Advertised as a coming-of-age story, Trebay’s beautiful book is more like a coming-to-terms story about his own fugitive needs. His New York of the 1970s was a place of ragpickers and performers, a Polaroid world of masquerade before AIDS, but also a period of seeming innocence before Reaganism changed the meaning of self-improvement.
Trebay brings those rather blurry times into focus, recalling “the imaginative, cinematic way in which people like Candy Darling experienced themselves in the special New York I am describing.” Everyone wanted to metamorphose, and the author, too, “without knowing into quite what.” He met with the writer Anita Loos and looked around Midtown for Greta Garbo, seemingly obsessed, quite naturally, with the essence of old photographs.
Trebay is an efficient and pleasingly wide-eyed guide to “the teeming microecology of downtown New York.” We hear of the Halston crowd, the Antonio Lopez gang, the Calvin Klein coterie, the Peter Hujar mob, the male model fraternity and a fading procession of no-hopers still hoping. It was a different time in America, “when qualifying for welfare was like winning a MacArthur Prize.”
Along the way, he nails a point that you won’t find in any tourist brochure. Great cities are not just myths, they are zones of actual experience. “Looking back,” he writes, “I see that there is something about the broke and crippled city that makes it hospitable to talent.”
Such subtleties may be altogether lost in today’s Darwinian melee, but Trebay’s people, the people of the 1970s and 1980s who characterized their Day-Glo city, were powerfully of their time, and many were what he calls “foremothers of renegade queerness.” It is perceptions like these that make Trebay’s book a bit of a summer treat, a memoir that, for all its fictive energy, returns a little political realness to the pre-election miasma.
Trebay had a ton of jobs — handbag designer, busboy at Max’s Kansas City, model, juice-bar guy, writer for The Village Voice — but his enduring task, revealed here, may have been to do something for those he left behind, his family, his friends.
Untethered, unfathered, Trebay made his own life, wrote his own kind of journalism, seeing what’s in front of him while sniffing the air for a sense of what is past. And the story he now tells was there all along, out from the mansions of the North Shore, where the little boats were said to beat on against the current. In fertile imaginations, those vessels sail on to other oceans and distant adventures, finally at one with the Hawaiian Surf.