GLR July-August 2024

book and a lot of sadness, but even they are conveyed mostly in subordinate clauses. To his credit, Trebay writes such beauti fully honed sentences that these clauses contain more than most people’s sentences. But one feels a reserve. The book’s tone is at once down-to-earth and ultra-sophisticated, not unlike his es says on culture and fashion in the Times —reserved, strict, sar donic—very Gore Vidal, in a way. But it’s always in the service of his native city. As for the other element that Trebay associates with ’70s New York, the danger, it’s not just people like Son of Sam. It was in the fact that you knew back then that your life depended, really, on your ability to run. New York in the early ’70s was a place where you never knew if the person you might meet on the next corner would be the love of your life or someone from whom you’d have to flee—as Trebay has to when chased by a mugger with only three steps between them on the stairs to his apartment. And then there was the real danger, the one nobody knew about, that no one could have known about, because it was al ready with us long before the first symptoms appeared. Trebay doesn’t write about AIDS any more than he has to, so it’s all the more effective when he says near the end of the book that New York has become for him a “ghost-infested place.” By not be laboring what we already know, he makes the emotional burnout from watching his friends die all the more effective. “Without being able at the time to articulate the feeling,” he writes, “I had grown soul-sick from attending memorial services ... increasingly fearful that, with each corner I turned, I might suddenly find myself face-to-face with some half-dead friends. It happened often.” The dead are still on his mind in the final pages of his memoir as he goes through the contents of his safety deposit box at a local bank in search of a wristwatch his mother wore when she was dying. “I invoke the love I hold for my ghosts as a proxy for a God I have no use for. I sit as I did that day in the quiet cubicle and invoke people like sexy can tankerous Peter Hujar and all the many men in those Super 8 films we made in the mid-seventies, such ones as I know have died, and the heroic friends met then and taken as their adult lives were starting, people whose valor and terror I can never forget.” From Candy Darling to the Tenth Floor, Do Something is a picture of a New York that no longer exists. (Even the row of bookstores on 4th Avenue just south of 14th Street is gone; only the Strand survives, on Broadway and 10th.) In this sense it is a dark book. Trebay keeps himself, like a good journalist, out of the story, but his memories are a lament for a city and a family that did not survive. It’s a bit like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time . Temps Perdu means not only time that has passed but also wasted time, the years when you should have been doing some thing more constructive. But the paradox of both Proust’s novel and Trebay’s memoir is that in neither case was their youth wasted. Proust always knew when, in the eyes of his friends, he was “wasting time” at the salon of Madame Straus that he was doing research for the novel he wanted to write. Trebay’s mem oir is about people and places in a city he was exploring that may have seemed pointless at the time but now form the sub stance of his book. “Do something!” his mother said to him on her deathbed. And so he has. July–August 2024

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