"Talking with that accent made us sound like we wanted to beat someone up."

On meeting Eileen Myles and reading CHELSEA GIRLS for the first time

I was on my knees the first time I ever met the poet, novelist, art critic, and 1992 presidential candidate Eileen Myles. My friend Susan Wheeler was giving a poetry reading in a Manhattan gallery. At the time I was married to a painter, working in publishing, and writing in notebooks. And I was shy. Susan was the only poet I knew.

That night in the spring of 1994, I was wearing a dress I bought at Street Life on Broadway. Rayon, knee length, a blue and white floral print, scoop-neck. Sexy-prim. The girl in the store told me that Glenn Close (who’d boiled a bunny in Fatal Attraction) had bought the same dress earlier that day.

I wasn’t pregnant when I bought the dress, and the night I met Eileen, I wasn’t showing yet.

I was kneeling to refresh my lipstick (Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow), and suddenly Susan was there, saying, “Linda, this is Eileen Myles. Linda’s from Boston, too.” Mortified to be caught trying to look pretty, I looked up at Eileen.

“What part of Boston,” Eileen said, in the accent I had when I wasn’t masking it.

Eileen was so handsome. Like my cousin Kathy, who was also a lesbian.

“Dorchester,” I said.

Talking with that accent made us sound like we wanted to beat someone up.

The day before I met Eileen, I’d read their story “My Father’s Alcoholism” in the Voice Literary Supplement.

“Our Father’s Alcoholism,” I accidentally called it when I got up off my knees to tell them how much I loved it. It was the first “literature” I’d ever read about the place and people I came from, the way we thought and spoke. About the bottles they found all over the house after their father died: “We always thought it was because we had been born. It was our fault.”

Black Sparrow published Chelsea Girls later that year, and that story was in the book. I couldn’t tell if it was fiction or autobiography, and I liked that. Eileen’s father’s alcoholism seeped into other stories, leading to this breathtaking passage in one called 1969: “I have always been dedicated to beauty. So was Mike. Our own. . . . Only I knew we were grabbing and fingering each other on the same couch on which my father had died. I always had the last laugh. Generally mine was internal.”

In a story about being the subject of a Robert Mapplethorpe photo, there’s more about Eileen’s father Ted Myles, a mail carrier, to whom this queer book is dedicated: “He had just had all his teeth pulled out. He was forty. I guess my father always had bad teeth. Oh your father was always self-conscious about his teeth. That’s why he doesn’t smile in pictures. He made friends with Mrs. Matheson who also had false teeth.”

My father, too, had had all his teeth pulled in one day at the VA Hospital when he was 44. Chelsea Girls was the perfect book for me, a co-dependent daughter of an alcoholic on the Boston-New York axis. Eileen was heir to the legacy of the New York School—James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara. The first time I’d ever read O’Hara was in my brother Joseph’s dorm room at Columbia. Though I was older than my brother, I was wholesome enough to be embarrassed by the book’s cover illustration—a Larry Rivers’ painting of a naked Frank O’Hara. My brother won Columbia’s Ford Prize for poetry after studying with Koch and writing imitations of Ashbery. Two years later, he died of AIDS at 24.

It was always my job as the oldest to watch out for the younger ones. Since I had not been able to save him, I kept looking for things and people that would make him come alive. Things like poetry and queerness.

In a story called Leslie, Eileen writes: “I followed her to seventh street. Always following disasters. Even when I was a kid. Long stories, believe me. Several steps behind damage. When a mother says keep your eyes on them and she goes on dumping potatoes in the water she probably doesn’t know you will go on watching them for the rest of your life. As if you could make anything stop.”

Those potatoes, that hint of the Irish diaspora, the hypervigilance and addiction to catastrophe, the many co-workers named Kathy at Filene’s, teeth as a marker of class, plus the bohemian New York world in which I lived among painters during the AIDS crisis: all part of Chelsea Girls.

Self-styling and the kinds of brand names we found in Filene’s bargain basement are important in Chelsea Girls: “I wore a blue workshirt and a Villager bikini and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals.” I had longed to have an older brother or sister, and the book let me in on what teenagers were doing and thinking when I was ten years old on the other side of town.

Eileen’s father was a mailman. Harvard Yard was on his delivery route. Many members of her family worked there. I did, too, after I graduated from college, before I moved away from Boston. We were the townies on campus.

About her father and the university’s Peabody Museum: “He liked the glass flowers. Everyone does, I guess.” I remembered something I overheard in the bookstore where I worked in Harvard Square. As I was shelving picture books, two blue-blooded ladies tried to choose a gift. One turned the pages of the Peabody Museum catalog and showed the book to her friend. “What about this? I should think that anyone who likes anything would like glass flowers.”

I was always shuttling from New York to Boston in those days; there was so much to help my mother with. Chelsea Girls conveys the jarring aspects of going from one place to the other while making a life among New York painters and poets. Robert Mapplethorpe’s black-and-white portrait is wasted in Eileen’s mother’s house where it’s surrounded by family photos. Eventually Eileen gets the photo back. It’s a relief to her mother to remove it from its frame. “Underneath my stepbrother and wife and five kids were sitting on their front porch. It was like discovering a Rembrandt under an old Norman Rockwell painting clipped out of the Post, something junky like that. Wonderful she said replacing icy me with an entire warm family. I haven’t seen that one in quite a while. She sat back down to look at it smiling.”

Eileen worked as poet James Schuyler’s assistant when he was struggling with mental illness and living in the Chelsea Hotel. Like his friends John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter, Eileen tried to adapt to Schuyler’s quicksilver needs, health challenges, and the occasional wardrobe mishap. A quip in Chelsea Girls captures Schuyler’s queer humor and their rapport: “Oh she’s much too interested in typesetting to really chase pussy.”

After my brother’s death and before I had a baby, I listened constantly to a tape of Schuyler reading his poems, which seemed written for me by someone I wasn’t like at all. “There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but / Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be / Never again the same. ‘Why, this is hell.’”

There’s a story in Chelsea Girls about a puppy Eileen’s family adopted. Eileen loved it, but the puppy cried too much, and Eileen’s mother got tired of it. The puppy and the father falling into his food and a mother who can’t take a minute more of it: “If I could have held my mother in my lap and patted her head, if she could have told me that’s what she wanted it would’ve been alright.”

The last line of the book is what another narrator (a ship’s captain, say, starting a log on the day of embarkation) might put first: “It was a hot summer day in 1979.” It was disorienting in a good way, as if shaping the past might lead to a future.

A year after I met Eileen, I moved to California with my daughter and exploded my life, thus becoming its protagonist. Failure and exile led to poetry. Like Eileen in the story “Light Warrior,” “I had waited all my life for permission. I felt it growing in my breast. A war was storming and it was behind me and I had moved my forces into the light.”

I didn’t see Eileen again till November 2011. By then the baby I’d given birth to in Manhattan was a teenager in California and I’d written a book of my own. I had low expectations around the publication of my book, so imagine my surprise when I learned what Eileen thought about it. “Linda Norton looks at the world like a dog who likes to tear apart couches,” Eileen said about The Public Gardens. “Though full of shame, this book is shameless.”

Who had I learned that from?

When I shared the blurb with a friend, she said, “Eileen Myles compared you to a dog!”

“I know,” I said. “I’m so flattered. Everyone knows how much Eileen likes dogs.”