The Lure (2 page)

A providential meeting provided a breakthrough. Bob Herron had been my lover briefly when I’d lived on Jane Street. I’d since moved, but he’d remained. During that do-nothing era of municipal government, block associations had formed—tiny community organizations operating politically. At the time of the murders at Hell, Herron was head of the nearby prominent Jane Street Block Association, whose membership included celebrities like urbanologist Jane Jacobs. Herron told me of the hush-hush New York Police Department undercover unit assigned to the West Village since the killings Arthur Bell had written about. He provided me with information about the undercover unit’s doings. Shortly afterward, a telephone repairman I had occasional “matinees” with told me about open telephone lines called loops, as well as how the NYPD—and others less official—utilized them. I’d also begun seeing, as a fuck buddy, a married motorcycle cop from Wantagh, Long Island, who had a cousin on the force in Manhattan, and they did some snooping for me. It all began to add up.

By the time I had a first draft done, I’d approached my publisher to pull strings and find me a contact within the New York City Police Department. I spoke to my informant three times. He offered nothing; I could ask questions based on data I’d collected, to which he would respond either yes or no. Each phone call lasted five minutes. He said “yes” a lot. I never knew his name, rank, or precinct, but later discovered he was in Internal Affairs, the group of police that investigates police. So I felt my assumptions were pretty accurate.

Obviously so did someone at the NYPD: They were sufficiently threatened that when the book was published after receiving very strong pre-pub reviews and blurbs—including one from Stephen King—they managed to arrange for one of their patsies to review
The Lure
in the Sunday
New York Times
Book Section, calling its concept a total fantasy. The reviewer, author Evan Hunter
(The Blackboard Jungle,
et al.) was, besides being a police apologist, a closeted queer, and so he performed two betrayals simultaneously.

Around the time of publication, I received another more overt threat: The place I lived in was shot at several times, leaving bullets in the 1839 brickwork and shell casings on the sidewalk outside the wrought-iron gate. As police “investigated,” I went on a longish book tour/vacation across the U.S.

The Lure
was a hit. It sold very well in hardcover, reaching best-seller status in Chicago, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles. It was the first gay-themed book taken by the Literary Guild Book Club, where they did me the added favor of starring the book in advertisements and catalogs along with a “Warning: Explicit Sex and Violence” sticker. This helped sell even more copies. Used to dismissive reviews of gay books, lit-starved gays perceived Hunter’s piece as a rave and snapped up the novel. I appeared as a “gay author” in bookstores—independents and early chains—across the country. T-shirts were made up, saying PICK UP
THE LURE.
When the book came out in paperback the following summer, it sold four times as many copies. Stephen King’s front cover quote helped. So did Jim Spada’s line from his
Advocate
review: “the best gay novel we have.”

Not everyone liked the book. Many gay politicos felt I was airing dirty laundry or at the least writing about a part of gay life they’d rather keep hidden. For years after, Toronto’s
The Body Politic
and Boston’s
Gay Community News,
among other publications, habitually battered my book and me. It certainly didn’t help that a homophobic movie with a similar theme was being released by, of all studios, Universal—a movie called
Cruising,
ostensibly based on a decade-old, little-known novel by a heterosexual.

According to Delacorte’s attorneys, the film had discarded its titular source and been rewritten to utilize large chunks—distorted—of my original treatment. I never put the blame on the producers I’d worked with; anyone could have found my treatment and abused it. My publisher, agent, and I considered a lawsuit, but the film was allegedly so bad—Leonard Maltin’s guide calls it “distasteful and badly scripted, presenting the gay world as sick, degrading, and ritualistic”—that instead we let it die a deservedly early death.

Meanwhile,
The Lure
was the best-selling gay novel of the year, available in a Dell paperback all over, including at your local drugstore and five-and-dime and on airport book racks. A year later, it was a hit in England and Australia. In Germany it was published by Schweizer Verlaghaus and became a runaway best-seller. It was even pirated in Eastern Europe! Since then it’s become the best-selling gay book ever in German, retranslated and reissued in 1993, when I did a seven-city book tour of that country. It was quickly translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Since publication in 1979,
The Lure
has continually been in print somewhere in the world, including in U.S. trade paper and gay book-club editions. It—and its author—have outlasted its severest critics; the most public of whom are either publicly quieted or deceased.

You’ll be surprised then to hear that the woman responsible for the book coming into existence, the woman responsible for it getting all the publicity it received, always considered the book one of her few publishing failures. Linda Grey expected
The Lure
to sell a few million copies, like the less-ground breaking novels she regularly saw into print. In hindsight, we now understand that the numbers
The Lure
reached were as high as any gay book ever sold: Gay readers, while numerous, are still far fewer than was at first assumed. Linda Grey was deeply disappointed by the novel’s sales, and I don’t think even my telling her years later of its long-term and international success changed her mind much.

Unfortunately, Linda is not with us to see the republication of
The Lure
in its new edition as a classic of gay literature. Manipulated by far smaller people with better political skills out of the organization she helped build into a giant, Linda died not long ago at a youngish age, needlessly, and to her friends and authors, tragically. Thus my dedication of this reissue to Linda Grey. If it weren’t for her and another woman, my agent of the time, Jane Rotrosen, this book would have never existed.

Along with contemporary novels like Holleran’s
Dancer From the Dance
and Edmund White’s
A Boy’s Own Story,
The Lure
did succeed in bringing gay literature a renown—and income—that eventually helped to solidify queer books as a niche in publishing.
The Lure
has been taught (whatever that means) in various university literature courses—in one case, alas, displacing a Graham Greene title. Among adepts of psychological thrillers, it’s still considered one of the handful of top books in the genre, along with Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon
and William Goldman’s
Marathon Man
—all of them, I note, written at about the same time.

Before
The Lure,
there were gay mysteries; Vidal’s Edgar Box series and Joseph Hansen’s Dave Brandsetter novels stand out. But after my novel, maybe even because of it, gay mystery became an important subgenre with terrific authors like Michael Nava, Katherine Forrest, and Stephen Saylor.

Although I’ve been asked numerous times to write a sequel to
The Lure,
I never truly considered it a possibility. And because of the
Cruising
debacle, until recently I never entertained film offers (so much for living in style). True, several phone conversations between Rainer Fassbinder and myself a few months before the genius film director’s unexplained suicide were pregnant with potential. He wanted to film the story in Berlin or Hamburg. Today we have many gay film directors, producers, and actors, but
The Lure
may be both too much, yet not enough of a period piece to interest them.

I also want to make a sidelight note: The late playwright Alan Bowne got around to handling my other gay-themed film idea, writing about 42nd Street teen hustlers with a passion and authenticity I couldn’t match. I published his play,
Forty-Deuce,
through the SeaHorse Press in 1986.

And of course, I never wrote another psychological thriller, although I’ve gone on to write in other genres as well as to adapt other genres to my own perverse requirements. The closest I’ve come was in
The Book of Lies,
an “academic mystery thriller” with droll echoes and references to the earlier book. Thus,
The Book of Lies
for a variety of reasons could not possibly have been written without
The Lure
coming first.

What the ultimate value of this reissued novel is, I resign to future readers: They’re the only genuine judges anyway.

Felice Picano

Los Angeles, 2002

March, 1976

The serene icy morning was shattered by a scream.

Noel Cummings swerved his ten-speed bicycle to a stop at the railing and listened. One sneakered foot remained tight in the metal clamp of the bike’s pedal, the other dangled gingerly on the thin concrete abutment.

Nothing.

Despite the frigid wind flapping off the Hudson River, he pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt to hear better.

Still nothing.

The wind whistling through those loose metal flaps of the crumbling warehouses on his right? Perhaps. Or perhaps an early morning driver screeching his tires as he sped around a corner below, on West Street.

He peered over the railing of the elevated West Side Highway, closed to traffic south of Thirty-fourth Street since a nearby section had collapsed almost a year before. Closed to car and truck traffic, that is. Still open to pedestrians; or, more common, to bicyclists like Noel, alone this early March morning at a quarter after six. Below him he could make out the back of a crawling Sanitation Department truck.

It must have been a hallucination, he decided, and put up his hood again.

Looking east, through lines of building walls sheer as cliffs, the night’s blackness had begun to give way to a pale cobalt at the horizon. Dawn soon.

Then the scream repeated. Even with his hood up, he knew it was no hallucination. It was so clear, so close, Noel could make out its direction—to the right, in front of him—and even a few terrified words—

“No…didn’t mean it.”

A light flickered on in the second-story warehouse window, level with where he stood. With it the scream ended.

Noel shot across the road to the right-hand railing. Light flickered in the third window; like matchlight, or a cigarette lighter guttering in the wind.

Then he heard the man’s voice again, lower, pleading, punctuated by what seemed to be gasps.

Noel leaned far over the metal railing to look in. Debris all over the floor, loose beams hanging half torn from the walls and ceiling. All he could make out were shadowy figures—one shrinking back, two others looming on either side of him. One’s arm was extended; something sharply pointed in his hand jabbed forward again and again, each thrust followed by a gasp, a cry, another “No.”

“Hey! What’s going on in there?” Noel shouted. “Stop that.”

The light flickered off.

Out of the sudden blackness someone shouted, “Help me! Please! They’re killing me!”

“Finish him off,” someone muttered.

“Help me!” the man shouted again. “Please!”

Then Noel heard what sounded like stumbling over broken glass. Was the man escaping in the dark?

Noel calculated the distance from the railing to the open window: a good ten feet. Too far to jump. Debris and broken glass to land on if he did. Glass that twinkled and cracked in the reflected streetlight as the shadows moved over it. He had to help him. But how?

“I’m coming in,” Noel shouted. He detached the heavy flashlight he carried clamped to his handlebars, flung it into the corner he thought the attackers were in. It smashed against something, thudded to the floor.

“…getting out of here,” he heard one voice say.

“Are you finished?” another asked.

Broken glass crunched under several pairs of feet. Then the man’s cries, his gasps again.

How could Noel get in there? “Leave him alone!” he yelled.

It was a quarter mile to the nearest exit. He’d have to chance it. They were scared by now. They’d leave.

He shouted once more that he was coming in, then spun around on the Atala Grand Prix and shot off north toward Eighteenth Street, adjusting his gears for the highest speed. In seconds he was moving so fast he almost missed the turnoff. He swerved right, swept over the broken concrete exitway like a ski jumper going off a lift, then down the ramp so suddenly the breath was whipped out of him. Lines of white and gray at the bottom of the ramp caught his eye—wooden police horses, obstacles. He had only an instant to avoid them. He jerked left, felt his right trouser leg brush one, leaned over almost horizontal to the road, regained his balance, then turned sharply and was skimming along West Street, over cobblestones, in and out of the steel pylons that supported the highway. One row of warehouses flashed by. Then the open space opposite Westbeth, telephone labs turned into artists’ housing. The second line of warehouses began, glimmering ominously in the yellow light of the mercury streetlamps.

He swung the Atala to a soundless stop. Now what? He’d expected to see fleeing figures, a car taking off.