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  Evil Companions

  Modern Erotic Classics

  The Houdini Girl

  Martyn Bedford

  The Phallus of Osiris

  Valentina Cilescu

  Kiss of Death

  Valentina Cilescu

  The Flesh Constrained

  Cleo Cordell

  The Flesh Endures

  Cleo Cordell

  Hogg

  Samuel R. Delany

  The Tides of Lust

  Samuel R. Delany

  Sad Sister

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  Dark Matter

  Michael Perkins

  Evil Companions

  Michael Perkins

  Beautiful Losers

  Remittance Girl

  House of Lust

  Michael Hemmingson

  Meeting the Master

  Elissa Wald

  Evil Companions

  Michael Perkins

  Modern Erotic Classics

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

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  First published by Essex Books, 1968

  This ebook edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Michael Perkins, 1968

  Preface copyright © Samuel R. Delany, 1992

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  The right of Michael Perkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-559-2 (ebook)

  Evil Companions was first published by Essex House in California in 1968. When the English firm Virgin Books sought to republish the novel in 1980, the largest book distributor in Great Britain refused to handle it. When a second English publisher, Savoy Books, attempted to reissue the book, still another distributor refused to touch it. For the first time since Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was banned in England, a serious American novel was suppressed—twice—and remains effectively banned in that country to this day.

  In London, New Worlds magazine reviewed the original edition of Evil Companions as a “work of genuine, if Satanic, art.” And prominent American writers have not wavered in their support for the book. The noted novelist and critic Thomas M. Disch recently wrote that “By comparison . . . Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is only a lesson in good grooming and a Manhattan restaurant guide. . . . Michael Perkins is America’s answer to de Sade.” In the Spring 1992 issue of American Book Review, novelist Samuel R. Delany called Evil Companions “An astonishing, rich and fascinating classic.”

  Preface

  ___________________ by Samuel R. Delany

  Evil Companions is a meticulous miracle of language and observation—an energetic and idiosyncratic vision of the interface between sex, pain, and the quotidian day-to-day of what, at the time it was written, would have been called “bohemian life”: the life of young writers, poets, actors, and people who liked their company, living out of each other’s pockets—in which there was seldom more than loose change anyway.

  But it can also be argued that this slim, intense volume, that first appeared from Essex House in November 1968 (while its twenty-five-year-old writer was in the hospital, recovering from a stab wound in the stomach sustained at a party in a small East Village bookstore in October—a party with an unexpectedly violent end), is a roadmark at the terminus of an extraordinary moment in history—a document lucid in its imaginative presentation of what had gone before, indispensable for an understanding of what would come after, in that odd phenomenon usually called the Sexual Revolution.

  Michael Perkins grew up in Portsmouth, Ohio, a small town overlooking the Ohio River into Kentucky. His first wife, the talented painter Renie Perkins, was from Dayton, where the two had met. For five years they had been living in New York. Renie was expecting their second child in months.

  The 1960s, when Evil Companions was written—the decade of “love-ins,” “flower-power,” and the Beatles—was paradoxically a decade of extraordinary political violence. The country was at war in Vietnam—and many of our population were furious about it. The decade had been ushered in with a handful of political assassinations, most notably that of black leader Medgar Evers and President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And in the young couple’s St. Marks Place apartment, Michael began the novel—his first—in early March, 1968.

  On the mild Thursday evening of April 4th, moments before seven o’clock, black men and women rushed out into and through the city streets, uptown and down, stopping others to declare, shocked: “Martin Luther King’s been killed...!” And at four minutes after seven, the first TV and radio reports confirmed what had been phoned across the country from around the Loraine Motel in Memphis, where the shooting had occurred on the balcony outside room 306 near six o’clock, and from around St. Joseph’s Hospital, where King was pronounced dead at seven, in an amazing web of phone calls to all and sundry.

  Soon black students were sitting in at New York City’s Columbia University to protest both James Earl Ray’s assassination of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader and their university’s racist admission policies. White students joined them. Then, on a mid-April night, a police attempt to end the student demonstration turned into a long night of beatings, brutalities, and riots—broadcast live over WBAI-FM to millions of New York City listeners till five o’clock in the morning. The broadcast was the result of an accident that began when, shortly after nine o’clock at night, the police jammed the Columbia University Radio Station which the protesters had been using to organize their now campuswide activities. With the communications center out, the police had hoped the demonstrations would fall apart. But the protesters phoned ‘BAI, which volunteered its services to them. Thus, when the police became violent, in millions of apartments throughout the city and environs, people heard students phoning in descriptions of the beatings going on around them, heard the thud of clubs on bodies and the screams of protesters, heard the hooves of a police horse smash through the glass walls of a phone booth, from which a young man was trying to describe the mayhem outside it—and the phone go dead. Moments later another phoned-in description from another part of the campus began.

  It went on like that for hours.

  Violence was still going on after one. Live reports still emphasized the tension and fear that covered the campus after three. At five in the morning, having stayed on the air several hours beyond its usual shut-off time, WBAI-FM finally closed down for the night, leaving millions of numbed li
steners questioning what exactly could have caused this in a land that vouchsafed political freedom and freedom of speech.

  And when, a few hours later—many people did not go to sleep at all that night—the seven AM news on the commercial stations around the city reported, “There was some trouble among the protesters up at Columbia University last night. But police had everything under control by nine-thirty....” One felt the combined bewilderment and outrage of a character in a Kafkaesque dream from which there could be no awakening.

  Between a week and two weeks on, Perkins finished his first draft of Evil Companions—on April 21st. (By then there were student demonstrations in sympathy with the Columbia students all over the country—all over the world) Sixteen days later, on May 7th, he mailed the manuscript off to his editor, Brian Kirby, at California’s Essex House.

  It was probably sometime in mid- or late May that I first met Michael (in that month, across the sea in France, the violence in New York in April had now generated a sympathy strike among French students, joined there by workers, whose own violences and glories have gone down in history ever since as “May ’68”). As two local writers in the East Village, we were introduced in the recently opened Earley by the Park bookstore by the owner Jack Earley, who was also Michael’s brother-in-law. Michael was a tall, lanky young man with a roundish face and a soft-spoken manner. At the time, I didn’t know that he had already edited the magazine Down Here, which had been the first U.S. publisher of Guillaume Appolinaire’s surreal erotic masterpiece, The Debauched Hospodar. At our introduction, we smiled and made two minutes of pleasant conversation. Then one or the other of us went on his way.

  Sometime in the same weeks, I recall coming home from dinner on Sixth Street at comic book-writer Dennis O’Neil’s, and having to wait for twenty-odd minutes before the police let me cross Avenue B. When, finally, I and the half-dozen people waiting at the corner with me were allowed to hurry over, we had to hold ashcan covers over our heads, since neighborhood snipers on the roofs were hurling bricks into the street.

  On May 20th, Renie delivered the couple’s second daughter. Two weeks later, on the evening of June 4th, Andy Warhol was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas—author of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto. Only two or three months before, Solanas had called Michael at his office at the small alternative publisher Croton Press, looking for a publisher for her book. Renie and Michael heard about her shooting of Warhol the morning of the fifth on the radio. Both of them recognized Solanas’ name—and Renie mentioned that, had things gone differently, it might have been Michael who was shot. Michael went off to his main job—teaching remedial reading in a Catholic school in Brooklyn. That day, the Warhol incident filled the headlines of the city papers; the shooting was not fatal, but Warhol was hospitalized.

  And painter Renie, still in post-partum depression exacerbated both by the general climate of violence in the city and this most recent shooting of an artist, went into her studio and drank a can of turpentine.

  Taped to the window of Earley by the Park, Michael’s sister left a handwritten note:

  Mike,

  Renie’s in Bellevue

  Perhaps another sentence suggested that things were under control—

  Coming home early that afternoon, Michael went first to the Village to look in on the Croton Press office, then walked back to the East Side—to learn of Renie’s condition through the note. He has no memory of the note’s last line: The moment he read it, he ran first to his apartment, then to the hospital.

  Later that afternoon, I passed by the store, realized it was closed, saw the same note, and, unaware of what had happened, jotted down a mention of it in my journal for that month.

  Shortly after midnight the same day, Robert Francis Kennedy, who had announced his candidacy for president back on March 16 and who had just won the California primary (his fifth win out of six), finished up a speech in a Los Angeles hotel and was ushered out through the kitchen—where he was shot to death by a Jordanian, Sirhan Sirhan. Follow-up headlines on the Warhol shooting were wiped from the front pages of the nation’s papers the next morning by the assassination of the late president’s younger brother.

  Renie died at Bellevue Hospital the next day, June 7th.

  A widower now with two daughters, one not six weeks old, Michael signed the contracts for his novel three weeks later on June 28th.

  My first encounter with the text of Evil Companions came some weeks after Renie’s death. At this distance, my general recollection is that at least one reason Jack Earley arranged to have Michael read at the bookstore was to give him something to take his mind off the recent tragedy. Jack asked me to be a second reader with Michael. My then-wife, poet Marilyn Hacker, had recently returned from San Francisco and came with me that night. I read a section from my newest science fiction novel. And Michael read the extraordinary post-climactic chapter from Evil Companions, “Blood Country Explored.”

  When the reading was over and the applause stopped (were there twelve people in the audience that night? there were certainly no more than eighteen), we broke up to fill paper cups from the gallon of Inglenook Chablis on the table beside the wall shelf: My memory is that for the first few minutes there was less talk than is usual on such occasions, as we recovered from the electric energy of Michael’s chapter.

  The summer rolled over into warm autumn. And on September 9th, editor Brian Kirby sent a letter to Perkins from California:

  ... And Evil Companions, believe it or not, is finally about to come out (in October), with only very minor emendations and an incredible cover by Leonor Fini. The attorney was impossible on this but I out-maneuvered him. His main objection was that it was too well written!

  Evil Companions did not come out till November. Between two and three weeks before copies were available, on October 19th, there was another evening wine party at Earley by the Park. There’d been a dinner beforehand at Michael’s house, with booze, pot, and peyote. A couple of people had brought their kids. Among those in the bookstore that night was a Ukrainian painter, who played the accordion—to which everyone, including Michael, was dancing. At about ten o’clock, from outside, came the sound of running feet and voices. Michael and Jack, with some of the others, went to the door to look. Some twenty or more Puerto Rican young men were coming down the street, some of them with baseball bats.

  Earley, who felt that he’d developed some rapport with the neighborhood adolescents, some of whom were in the gang, started out—over Michael’s restraining advice—to talk to them. Earley sported a short blond beard at the time and someone in the gang shouted: “Dirty hippie, look at his beard...!” Just then the accordion player stumbled out in front of Jack—and went down with two baseball bats to the head. Earley got the next blow, and Michael grabbed him to protect him—to receive a knife in the side that cut through to his stomach. Describing it later, Michael wrote that it felt like “a soft punch.” It was only when they were back in the store, with the accordion player lying in the corner, his skull seeping blood, that Michael realized he’d been stabbed. Children were crying, grown-ups were terrified, and the gang outside was throwing things at the store windows—till a window broke! Repeated calls to the police brought no response for more than an hour. At one point Michael went to the door and, shouting and brandishing a knife at the men now waiting across the street (“I was practically berserk,” he described himself, at that point), he broke the last of the batters up—as the ones with the baseball bats moved on.

  Michael went to the hospital where he was admitted—and was on the critical list at Bellevue for the next two weeks.

  An intern told him that it was only because he had eaten so little that day and had so much alcohol in his stomach that he lived. Michael still carries an eight-inch scar from that night.

  Novelist Donald Newlove lived next door to Earley by the Park: His novel The Painter Garbrial (McCall Publishing Company, New York: 1970) contains a fictionalized but generally accurate account of that nig
ht’s occurrences across Avenue B from the southeast corner of Tompkins Square. And Perkins himself wrote an article around it about a year and a half later.

  When, in November, copies of Evil Companions arrived in New York City (and I purchased my first of several, at Earley’s bookstore—for soon the volume was one I was giving away with great enthusiasm to my friends), the writer was in the hospital, recovering. But Earley placed copies in one of the cracked-across bookstore windows, above a sign that declared, for the whole neighborhood to read:

  Perkins Lives!

  I go into all the violence, political and personal, surrounding the writing and publication of Evil Companions only to point out that the extreme violence informing the text itself has its correspondences both in the politics of the times—and in the life of the writer.

  The fundamental conceit of Evil Companions is simple: Suppose the new breed of pot-puffing, long-haired young people—beatniks or hippies—really were as perverted and sexually dangerous as a hypostasized American Middle Class and Working Class then claimed to fear....

  The book was written at a time when long hair and beards on men were far rarer than they are today—and usually confined to a single neighborhood of any given city. And anyone whose clothing or hair reflected that lifestyle often thought twice about the consequences of leaving that neighborhood.

  The class divisions that made that aspect of the novel comprehensible in 1968 have, since, shifted decidedly—so that where one is most likely to see, say, long hair on men today is precisely in those working class venues that, in 1968, would have been the source of the imprecations shouted at the narrator in Chapter Twelve: “Why don’t you get a haircut?” “They ought to put him in a zoo!” “Hey, pussy face!” Still, the shifting of those social configurations leaves Perkins’ specifically sexual vision, if anything, the more intense.

  Evil Companions takes its power from a combination of its milieu and its anger. The only place in the novel we must move the suspension of disbelief to a new order is in Chapter Fourteen, when the action leaves the East Village for the House of the Surgeons on the Jersey Palisades. But its return in the next chapter to the milieu from which the novel takes its strengths registers like Antaeus once more setting foot upon the earth, more than making up for the brief defection. And the novel’s finale, fittingly enough on a train that travels to and from the city, is truly frightening—for those who have followed the book on a deeper level than that of a simple sexual picaresque.