Spotlight on … Brad Gooch Zombie 00 (2001)

 

‘Zombies, as we all know, are made, not born. But in Gooch’s weirdly blasé tale of sadomasochism and bondage, the unnamed narrator appears to possess zombie qualities from a very young age. On a visit to a museum in Scranton, Pa., with his parents, he is mesmerized by grainy, gray anthropological photographs of pain and abasement on display in the voodoo room. Soon afterwards, Mark, a sadistic 15-year-old, christens the younger boy “”Zombie”” and makes him his willing personal slave. Zombie performs simple tasks like sharpening pencils, but he is also sent on dangerous assignments that result in beatings by older bullies. The ensuing tale is Zombie’s search for the “”most colorful master.””

‘In high school Zombie is put to work by a hood named Mitch and his girlfriend, Paulette, who start a small crime wave. Eventually, Zombie gets caught vandalizing a funeral home and is kicked out of the house by his dad. Making his way to New York City, he discovers the subculture of s&m; clubs, where he meets Sir Edward, M.D. Sir Edward is a drug dealer and a very willing sadist, as is his nephew, an aspiring wrestler with the improbable moniker Wseal64735. But Sir Edward goes too far one night, and Zombie moves on to a bodybuilding public access cable performer named Control Freak. Control Freak is not the “”most colorful master,”” either, but he does give Zombie a one-way ticket to Haiti, where Zombie finally gets lucky.

‘Gooch takes his hero’s search for perfect zombiehood seriously. Sexually adventurous readers might find themselves genuinely sympathetic to Zombie’s quest, and at times even amused by his search for the perfect balance between fear and worship. However, this far-from-the-mainstream saga is not for the faint of heart.’ — PW

‘Images of the Marquis de Sade’s bedchamber and Andy Warhol’s Factory will undoubtedly assail readers of this defiantly outré third novel by Gooch, the biographer of Frank O’Hara, City Poet (1993) and author of such in-your-face fiction as The Golden Age of Promiscuity (1996).

‘The narrator is a nameless youth from a small Pennsylvania town who finds an objective correlative for his compulsive self-abasement in a Scranton museum’s “sacred voodoo chamber” exhibit. Abused and exploited by schoolmates and others (to whom he is, simply, “Zombie”), he leaves his scandalized, sorrowful parents, and — in a rather blatant imitation of James Purdy’s famous first novel, Malcolm — moves on to New York City.

‘Thereafter, the story becomes a series of searches for his true “master” and encounters with unconventional reality instructors and benefactors: a drug-addicted physician who insists he be addressed as “Sir Edward,” a muscle-bound TV talk-show impresario (“Control Freak”), the Son of God Himself (as worshipped by “the Jesus Men,” who hold a rally in Washington’s RFK Stadium), genuine-article “zombie masters” met during a Haitian visit, and, after Zombie’s return to Manhattan, miscellaneous denizens of the lurid “club Crypt,” where people from his past mysteriously appear. (Perhaps — though Gooch doesn’t spell this out — he’s seeing his life pass before him, just as he’s about to leave it.)

‘The novel isn’t nearly as awful as it sounds: Gooch writes crisp, surprisingly evocative straightforward sentences, and has found a resonant, troubling metaphor for the kind of passivity and self-loathing capable of shading into the destructive recesses of sadomasochism. If you like Anne Tyler and Jan Karon, you may want to pass on Zombie 00. Still, this is, in its uniquely empathetic and perceptive way, really a rather successful exploration of a hapless life lived on the psychosexual razor’s edge.’ — Kirkus

 

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Further

Brad Gooch Website
‘In the Gritty New York of the ’70s and ’80s, Not Exactly a Model Life’
‘PHOTOS: The Golden Age of Brad Gooch’
Brad Gooch @ Twitter
Brad Gooch @ goodreads
‘Stroking my inner boyfriend’
‘Impertinent Questions with Brad Gooch’
‘Are You Cool Enough to Read This Book?’
‘Family’, a short story by Brad Gooch
‘Club Culture’, by Brad Gooch
‘Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic Reconsiders the Arabian Nights’, by Brad Gooch
‘Carver Was the Rage’, by Brad Gooch
‘How Gossip Became History’, by Brad Gooch
‘Maugham’s Love Life’, by Brad Gooch
‘The Library of America interviews Brad Gooch about Flannery O’Connor’
‘Brad Gooch, Author of Smash Cut, Remembers Howard Brookner and Gay Culture in ’70s & ’80s NYC’
Audio: Brad Gooch on NPR’s ‘Bookworm’
Fashion Reverie Interview: Brad Gooch
‘Touched by Evil’
Brad Gooch on Philip Taaffe
Buy ‘Zombie 00’

 

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Extras

Brad Gooch & Tim Dlugos: Public Access Poetry 8 18 77

Brad Gooch on The Mineshaft for the 6th Annual Last Address Tribute Walk

Uncle Howard clip – Date Books (Brad Gooch)

Brad Shariati

Book Talk with Brad Gooch: “Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love”

Brad Gooch And Kalin Sorenson

 

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Interview

 

THE STANDARD: Most of the events of this book took place more than thirty years ago—why write about them now?
BRAD GOOCH: The love and loss story of my relationship with Howard was something that I always felt I needed to tell. Also, I often get young gay guys asking me, what was it like in the seventies?

You were once a young gay guy freshly arrived in the city—what’s it like to meet a young version of yourself?
It’s weird—it’s like being the ancient mariner or some thing. I moved with my now husband Paul to Chelsea, right across the street from the Chelsea Hotel, without it sinking in that Howard and I had lived there for three years. We opened a copy shop together right on that block. Howard had died a block away at London Terrace.

Every morning I would go walking down with my gym bag and look up and see this fifth floor window, where Howard and I had lived, where I had my 30th birthday party and things. So, it started triggering these memories. And writing this in some way relieved me of these ghosts.

With the amount of partying in the book, I imagine memories of the period aren’t totally reliable. How did you do your research?
I kept diaries and archives. It wasn’t organized, but it turns out I still had the chopsticks wrapper from when Howard wrote his phone number down for me the night we met at this gay bar, the Ninth Circle. He wrote it on the back of a chopstick wrapper and I still had it.

So, you were attracted to New York by this idea of an artistic life. When you arrived, what was the artistic and literary culture that you walked into?
The literary culture was the same as all the rest of the culture I think, which was that everybody was out of their mind all the time–partying and going to clubs. So what was absent in New York in the seventies was careers.

It’s hard to imagine, as someone who pays present-day New York City rent, what New York without careers was like. What does it do to a group of people in their twenties when you take the idea of career out of it?
Oh it’s just so much fun. But an important part of it was that rents were so little. I lived on Perry Street in the Village for $160, which seemed steep. That’s what made it possible. It seemed like people didn’t have jobs, although they sort of did.

It was great, because actually a tremendous amount of work was done in that period, and people look kind of nostalgically to all that. It was kind of done without noticing, so those Robert Mapplethorpe photographs grew out of his nightlife, a certain amount of them. He was at leather bars every night, and you wouldn’t necessarily imagine how much work was going on.

It was kind of serious fun.

You say you weren’t careerists—were you confident that the work coming out of your scene had value and would get recognized?
We were even coming out of a previous kind of generation in a way, which was the Frank O’Hara generation. When I came to New York to go to college in 1971, there were still Frank O’Hara parties. He’d been killed five years before, but there were all of these artists and poets who would get together, and they were famous enough at the time, like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

And then there was a real sense in the group that Dennis Cooper’s opinion of your poem mattered more than The New Yorker. It was mythology in a way, but we all believed it. We were living the idea that our friends were the most interesting important people. So that made it viable.

We had a backdrop fantasy to go on, which was the old bohemian idea where you don’t have any money, and you’re putting all this energy into your work and no one understands except these 12 cool people you hang with. It also helps that we actually were having all of this fun. That’s the thing that can be missing.

When did you start to take having a career more seriously?
I was writing poems and stories and I was in graduate school at Columbia. Then I got into modeling, and I was in Paris and Milan, and then I was back in New York. Then I was with Howard, and for a while we ran a copy shop in the Chelsea Hotel. I was writing porn reviews for the New York Native, and then somebody at GQ saw them, and as a joke had me write something.

Was this VHS porn?
No this was pre-VHS. This was films in theaters. A lot was going on in the theaters

So then you started working at Vanity Fair?
I had a friend who was working at something called Manhattan Inc, a new magazine, and I did a profile of Diane Abrill, who was a downtown personality. And then somehow Tina Brown saw this and got me into doing Vanity Fair. I was way over my head, as I talked about in the book, so she sent me off to do these kinds of interviews with movie stars, and cover stories, and it was very hard because I didn’t know how to write these things.

Was competition an issue in your circle?
Yes, in such a small little postage stamp size area, there was competition. It was intense, but it always seemed that art was a pretext for…getting laid and doing drugs and doing all of these kinds of things. And that turned out be the thing that lasted, the others went away. But you know, there was a party situation. So…

If everyone is getting laid, that takes the edge off, right? Sexuality democratizes things. It wasn’t like we were all only hanging out with each other, there was a relaxedness to the period.

You have written about the continuity of gay life and mentioned that one of your first boyfriends was Frank O’Hara’s last boyfriend.
J.J. Mitchell.

Do you feel like that continuity still persists in New York today, or has it been severed?
I don’t think it does. Allen Ginsberg, some time around then, traced some kind of lineage that he was six steps removed from sleeping with Walt Whitman. This kind of lineage was very important.

The six degrees of Kevin Bacon for sexual partners.

This all cracked due to AIDS more than anything. That period got flattened into history quickly.

I had my first book of stories published by a gay press. We didn’t think a regular press would ever publish these stories, and for a long time they didn’t. But the upside was that there were all of these different gay bookstores and you could go on extended book tours to all of these cities with a built in audience. People really bought books, and they were really interested.

Were you intimidated being quite young and a poet and meeting someone like Allen Ginsberg?
I met Allen Ginsberg — maybe I’m a stalker — when I was about 17. And I sent him this, you know, kind of poem that I had written. And it just was a complete imitation of him.

And then he wrote back, I still have it, “You do go on worse than I do…” It was kind of a put down, from this great, great figure.

 

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Book

Brad Gooch Zombie 00
The Overlook Press

‘Zombie00 is a touching story that explores the dark recesses of human desire and offers a glimpse into how we connect.

‘Meet “Zombie,” a strange and remarkable young man, growing up in Truckstown, Pennsylvania. His earliest childhood memories of visiting the “Sacred Voodoo Chamber” in the nearby Scranton Art Museum leave him in thrall and help spark in him a process of “zombification” that will last a lifetime. Fear and worship become his guiding forces as he stumbles through life wondering if there are more of his kind or if he is alone. After a series of petty crimes, committed at the behest of his first master, Zombie is given a tiny inheritance and a one-way bus ticket to New York City. He embarks on a weird, surprisingly funny and ultimately poignant odyssey where he meets those who will be responsible for his destiny.’ — The Overlook Press

Excerpt

How Zombie passed his earliest years in Truckstown, Pa.

It all started at the Everhart Museum. The way to the museum was blocked by a huge ugly fountain. What’s the big difference between a sculpture and a fountain? The art museum was near a coal museum, where you descended into a cavern that was brightly lit. It was a wormhole. A fake coal mine. There was another mine a few miles away where they’d turn out the lights and you’d be lowered in a bucket to worship the cool blackness. I mean tour it, not worship it.

Anyway. There I was with my folks. They were nearby, in front or lagging behind. They were in their own world, I always thought. Now I realize it was I who was in my own world. The museum rose before us in a park called Nay Aug Park that never seemed quite right. The museum seemed quite right. It was made of tan stones.

The inside, though, is where the point is. The best part of the art museum was that it didn’t have much art. Instead it had artifacts. I was often scared in there. I was scared by the gigantic black-marble-and-onyx stairs. I was scared because there was no air. I was scared because of the feeling of ancient spells being released inadvertently. I knew none of the paintings on the walls had anything scary in them. So I tried the more adventurous and three-dimensional shows.

My favorite show was the glowing rocks, which you entered through heavy black drapes that hung down over the doorway. Heavy, weighted, leaden, black velvet drapes. You pushed your way in. Inside what seemed the smallest room in the world, acloset of a room, a horizontal case ran alongside the wall, low enough to view. Then there would be a trick with the lights. Either the electric lights of the chamber would be flicked off, or there never was any electric light in the chamber and the lights that would go snap would be those in the case, leaving only a phosphorescent glow of different rocks with veins made of blue chips of stars or of the green hair of moss. That’s how magical it was, I swear. Then you’d leave with the rest of the onlookers. Not feeling alienated from anybody at all. The rocks cured me. They healed me. I really felt I needed to be healed.

I tried to carry that sensation into the rest of my life. I did it by growing moon rocks in my bedroom. You brought them to life by dropping a liquid chemical from an eyedropper held up in the air. The rocks slowly began to grow and ooze with pink and orange colors. So the transformation brought them into the same area in my mind as the glowing rocks at the museum. But those in the museum were geological and were protected.

The mummy produced in me a feeling similar to that produced by the glowing rocks. Of course none of these things mean anything to you. Glowing rocks? A mummy? Inside a room on the second floor was a mummy. The mummy was lying in a coffin or boat or shadow shaped like the silhouette about it, the way cartoon monsters are given dark or bright auras that hug them. It was wrapped in bandages. I was amazed that Scranton, Pennsylvania, was important enough to be entrusted with one of the ancient Egyptian dead. That made me feel a little better about myself, since Truckstown was located near Scranton.

But nothing compared to the sacred voodoo chamber. There the movies played in my head no matter what time of day or night. It was as if I were born there. Except when particles of dust were revealed dancing away by overhead schoolroomish lights and windows. I longed to be inside the sacred voodoo chamber. It barely looked sacred to anyone else, probably. Most of it was old, gray, grainy photographs taken by anthropologists and ethnopharmacologists. One showed a dancer pierced by needles. A colored one was a photograph of a woman in red. But late in the afternoon the oozing green candles they allowed to burn for dramatic effect picked up a glow from the crossed, burnished bronze weaponry. A round straw fan was tucked into a wall as well. I can’t explain it. No one was there. The candles started talking to me. They talked without words, as in a dream. One said, Look up to heaven! I felt very special. To actually get a little bit of help and guidance from beyond.

That’s when I knelt on the cold stone floor, which was swirling with veins of white and black coloring. My little legs were trembling. My knees hurt from the unusual pressure on them. I folded my hands together in a gesture of prayer and supplication. I was begging and saying thank you. My heart felt very warm for the first time in years. I was heating up my own heart. Or the forces were heating up my own heart for me. I inhaled rapturously.

Suddenly a stupid, fumbling hand was on my shoulder. The hand of an old fainthearted guard. I imagined he would be punished for this insurrection by the forces in the room. If not now, later. He was followed by my folks. They knew I wasn’t hurt. They knew I was into one of my “acts,” as they mistakenly labeled them. But they were mortified that this time the incident was taking place in public, not just within the entrails of our house. It showed them up badly. It said that something was wrong with them, not just with me. Which they knew too well, though it was never discussed in any way.

They rushed me out of there. Stashed me in the back of a car. Their car. Their lime green mobile, a stuck-together assemblage of metal and fur. We went home without a word. Which is the way the procedure usually went. What could they say to me that they wouldn’t really be saying to themselves? It was a grisly way for a freak like myself to live. Especially now that I had been made a zombie for the first time in my life that I was conscious and fully aware of. I’m sure there were earlier slips and slides.

The zombification often started with just such a falling to the knees.

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes. Did you see her Joyce film? I thought it was strangely very, very good. I really like R-G’s films, but I don’t think anything he did beats his novels. ** Misanthrope, I read … most but not all of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which is, you know, unbelievable, but it fits smoothly into the kind of difficult fiction I read constantly for pleasure than I think it slides as easily into your reading habits, so I don’t know. Intimidating, yes, in any case. Yeah, normal twink porn starring cute young frolickers quickly glazes my eyes. I guess it’s sort of my attitude to fiction, visual or written, in general, i.e. show me something I don’t expect and/or already know or something. Anyway, not weird of you, yeah. Enjoy the break. ** G, Hi! Oh, cool. Her work is really special and was way ahead of its time too. Preparing for teaching, right. So, so many of my friends are in the middle doing that exact same thing while trying to figure out how to maximise the Zoom context right now. Good luck with that. Thank you about ‘Ugly Man’! The publication of ‘The Weaklings XL’ was kind of a debacle. The press was dying at the time, and they didn’t send out any review copies, and they didn’t print many books, and it went out of print quickly. I hadn’t thought about it being reprinted. I mean, yeah, if some press wanted to republish it, I’d be way into that. I think the poems in that book are my best ones. I might see a visiting friend today, so that could be blissful. I hope your day is bliss central! ** Matthew Doyle, Hi, Matt! How very awesome to see you! How nice that the post aligned with the thinking-out of your syllabus. Cool. Paris has been hanging in there, and, boy, am I grateful. Things are starting to look just a little dicey of late, but we’ll see. I don’t know Connor Willumsens ‘Anti-Gone’, no. I’ll go hunt it. And I’l hit that trailer as soon as I’m outta here. What a fascinating sounding project! I really hope I’ll get to see it. Any at least tentative plans to perform it? Is that even possible yet? You teach at PCC! My alma mater! I kind of made the final, official decision to become a writer while I was there. How cool. Are you enjoying it? Another friend of mine, Brian Tucker, is teaching there. Do you know him? Again, I’ll watch the teaching video lickety-split. Thanks for the share in advance, man. 29 Palms! I used to go to Joshua Tree quite a lot, and I often lodged in 29 Palms. I liked it. It was kind of spooky. Spooky and extreme high heat are a weird combination. The Dumont film is worth seeing, yeah. Quite different from his more familiar filmmaking style, but, yeah, fun, a watcher. Excellent to get to talk with you. Don’t be a stranger, if it suits you. That would be swell. ** Bill, My, of course, pleasure. Yeah, I saw a crazy video of SF getting bombarded with lightning strikes. Wow. ** Steve Erickson, I could, and I even should, but I suppose I fear those insane people. I’m a big Jim Steinman fan, as I think you know. Hosted a post about his stuff. I think he’s kind of a weird minor genius. ** h(now j), Hi! Uh, hm, I don’t remember the exact reason I did that post. I’m a big admirer, obviously, and I had thought about it for a while. I must have seen something written about her or something that jogged me. Yes, I agree with you. And I too think her Joyce film is amazing and strangely so overlooked. The weather here is kind of wonderful right now. A blur of dying summer heat and the first broad hints of brisk fall. All I know is that ‘I Wished’ is supposed to come out late next year, date too be determined. I haven’t heard anything newer from the publisher. I’m guessing they’ll nail a date down this fall or something. Good luck with all! ** Right. Although Brad Gooch is best known for his biographies (of Frank O’Hara, Flannery O’Connor, and Rumi), he’s a also a completely stellar fiction writer, although few seem to know that since all of his novels and fiction books (‘Jailbait’, ‘Scary Kisses’, ‘The Golden The of Promiscuity’, and today’s spotlit novel) are very out of print, criminally. ‘Zombie00’ is his most recent and probably least known novel, and it’s a super good read, and that’s why I’m foisting it on you. Give it a shot. See you tomorrow.