"Without moving a comma"

A belated remembrance of Gary Indiana (1950–2024)

“Gary Indiana Veiled,” 1981, by Peter Hujar © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society, New York City

I wrote this shortly after learning Gary Indiana died. Last night, at the Poetry Project in New York, there was a memorial to him. I didn’t attend—I had helped to organize a labor meeting uptown and was worried I would be too late, especially since the Project’s website said, “This reading is full.” Somehow, the thought of schlepping all that way on an empty stomach, only to get turned away was too much. Of course, it’s just an excuse, like so many things we want but somehow lose the heart for.

This morning I woke up kicking myself for not going, and revisited the piece. I’m sharing it here.

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The first, and sadly only, real conversation I had with Gary Indiana took place at a Paris Review party in December 2022. Maybe I always viewed him as somebody better admired from afar until you can properly hold your own which, of course, with someone like Gary, would be probably never. That night, he held court with a group of far younger writers and artists. I noticed him speaking to someone I knew and, summoning my courage, finally went up to him.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about something you wrote in Do Everything in the Dark,” I said. “I have a friend who keeps repeating the same stories again and again, like you described of Paul Bowles, without moving a comma.” The line epitomizes what I might admire most about Gary’s work, how he could transform an otherwise insufferable experience into something recognizable and acidly hilarious.

Gary seemed to recognize exactly what I was talking about, and to my delight, he howled in approval. He said he “wanted to get Paul Bowles back” for taking him to the “best spot in Tangiers,” via a driver, along with some other person, and then not getting out of the car.

“Aren’t you going to get out?” Gary had asked.

“Why would I? I’ve already seen it,” scoffed Bowles.

And so Gary apparently got out and sat on a beach towel for two hours with some stranger who turned out to be a bore—clearly, a version of hell for Gary, who seemed to never say a boring or commonplace thing.

“You know I feel more sympathy with him now,” Gary said. “You have to protect yourself from the present, because the past is better. I get why he had to do that.”

“But what do you think of Jane Bowles?” asked my friend. He made the sign of the cross, in devotion.

“Two Serious Ladies is the best novel ever written in English,” he declared, hand to heart. “I pick it up at least ten times a year.”

Some months later I saw his reading at the Poetry Project for the reissue of Do Everything in the Dark, as happens. What he was going to read was “incredibly depressing,” he warned, and it’s true what followed was about death and decline, but written with such spirit and élan, and delivered with such gravity and abandon and mordant gallows humor, each line like a shot tossed back, the whole thing like a dance between life and death, with Gary on top (or, if you prefer, bottom). Words fail to describe just how good the reading was; he read as if he were god, and god was an elfin septuagenarian with the choppy dyed hair of a punk.

At the bar, I asked if he might be willing to let me publish what he read in McSweeney’s Quarterly, where I was working at the time. He demurred, citing a possible conflict with a UK publisher. (The text later appeared in Granta as “Five O’Clock Somewhere.”) Some months later, I tried him again, over email, to see if he might write something for an upcoming manifesto-themed issue. Once more he demurred, this time citing illness. But he ended on a pleasant note, which I did not think to jot down: something along the lines of “Hope we can work together another time,” which of course I hoped too. Maybe I did not think to save those last words because, naively, I hoped exchanges like this between us could become so common there would be no need to save them, because there would always be more.

The final time I saw Gary was at another party for the Paris Review’s fall 2024 issue. He had been invited to read some poems by James Schuyler. I still can’t forget how he stifled a sob when arriving at Schuyler’s lines: “it’s eleven years since Frank sat at this desk and saw and heard it all:” The part that seemed to get him was the surprise syntactical attack inside “it’s eleven years since” and the simple concreteness of “this desk.” He paused, hand to mouth, then went on.

Like O’Hara, Gary seemed to hear it all. We’re lucky he saw to writing so much of it down.

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I’m hoping to keep this thing more regularly updated, and I hope you will join me, if I happen to actually do that. In the meantime, take care.