I'm trying to get my mind around chapter 04. I've finished reading my research book (Edmund White's States of Desire) and I know where I want to go with this chapter, but the inspiration isn't coming. It'll come, I know it will, but there's always a feeling of frustration waiting for it.In this chapter, "Hell's Kitchen," Randy is thinking back over his relationship with Charles Hatch, the first person he met when he arrived in New York City. Charles dies of an brain aneurysm while coked up having sex with a man much younger than him (he is 63 at death).
At death, Randy is upset with Charles because Charles has become a financial supporter of Randy's friend August Collins (who becomes the performance artist "august chagrin" for whom the novel is named). Randy met August on New Year's Eve 1989, they had a brief relationship, during which time, Randy asked for Charles' assistance with August's career - getting him a director, rehearsal space and performance opportunities. After August's career is underway, Randy and August have a falling out, and Randy wants Charles to stop funding August's career, but Charles refuses. That is the source of Randy's unhappiness.
Randy believes Charles changed, but realizes, after death, that he was the one who changed. He thinks back on his arrival in New York City in a rental car, his one night in a hostel and the ad for a job he found on the hostel bulletin board (a weekly newspaper focused on the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood where Charles lives called The Kitchen Sink). Charles takes Randy under his wing, first as a "personal assistant," and at the end of the summer, when the newspaper begins publishing, as its listings editor; Charles also provides Randy with an apartment in an old tenement building his family owns (the Hatch fortune is from real estate).
Randy flashes back on what precipitated his arrival in New York: a year at the University of Florida, in which his best friend Christian betrays him. The two of them had plans to move to New York to become famous playwright (Randy) and actor (Christian). Randy rents a car because he is afraid of flying, after his round trip to Las Vegas the summer after high school with his neighbor friend Diamond White, which was fraught with turbulence, literally and figuratively.
Chapter 04 is written after Charles' death in 1990, but the bulk of it takes place in 1982. It is difficult figuring out how to make that work.
Randy and Charles had sex shortly after he arrived and moved out of the hostel and into Charles' loft, but the sex is more for Randy's "education;" Charles readily and constantly tells Randy that he isn't his type. Unlike Charles' other numerous sex partners (muscle men in their mid-twenties) though, Randy and Charles maintain their friendship. Randy recognizes that Charles is like a father to him, though he is three times older than Randy when they meet.
The night Randy moved into his apartment, a stray cat splattered with tar comes to his fifth floor window. He spends most of his first summer in New York at home watching TV and hanging out with the cat whom he named Ahoy, not even realizing that he missed Gay Pride Weekend (Charles is on Fire Island) until he sees coverage of it on the local news.
That seems like a kind of lame place to end the story, but I haven't even figured out how to get to this point dramatically. Charles is a difficult character to write. I have several versions of him, all very different. Mostly I see him as a very tall, thin, healthy but insecure man who believes sex won't kill him because he is a top. He is referring to AIDS, which is a bigger and bigger issue in New York City from 1982 when Randy arrives.
In the end, sex does kill Charles, in a sense, because all of the cocaine he snorts is in order to keep up with the young men he is fucking.
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