Since the 1970s, GUY TREBAY has been New York’s keenest culture reporter – unearthing characters and trends, both high and low, for publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times where he writes regularly for the Styles section. This past year, Trebay, turned his pen inward, publishing the critically acclaimed, brutally honest memoir Do Something. PETER DAVIS discovers that Trebay’s youth and pre-New York Times life was as fascinating and colorful as the eccentric people and places he has famously profiled.
Your memoir ends in 1975 with your mother’s death.
That was the structure the book took. The original draft was probably twice the length. Whereas it’s not linear, there is a kind of chronological integrity. I kind of migrate in both directions from 1975, but that’s the anchoring year. I wanted to end it at that peak. The period that is mostly described, the period of emergence, was complete.
That period of New York is such a big character in the book.
God bless you for saying that. If I had to write about New York now, I would be writing fiction because I would be inventing that New York. I think that a lot of this has to do with being a depiction of the pre-digital world. There was no internet for most of the time that I’m writing about. The kind of tribalism that characterized New York exists probably in another kind of way, but principally online now. It’s a book that’s very much about the physical textures of the city in the sense of the smells and the feel. Recently some colleagues of mine did a piece about where young people could go to meet. And it struck me at the time as such an odd thing that you’d have to have an investigative piece about where to meet humans. That was not a problem that any of us had in those days.
There’s so much detail about the people and especially the places.
I am a writer who has been kind of obsessed with detail. And I have a very strong memory. I was talking to Marie Brenner, the writer who wrote a brilliant memoir, and she said, ‘have you done any research?’ And I kind of was taken aback. I was like, well, it’s my life, not really. And I then wrote it, without having researched it, as a kind of memory project. And then after the first draft, I did research and quite extensively, mostly as a matter of fact checking. But the textures are deeply ingrained for me.
Do you think that New York still has wild, underground characters? I’m thinking of Herman Costa and Adam Purple, to name two.
I’m not a young person anymore, but I would guess that people find an analog to that online, but it can never have the same texture as life. There was a lot more room for eccentrics. People lived on virtually nothing because rents were so cheap. New York was on the skids. Artists go where there’s real estate. They were tremendously eccentric characters, that’s for sure. All the people that I write about in the book, were in a kind of a golden moment. It didn’t feel particularly golden at that moment, but they were in this moment of being able to be completely experimental in ways of life, ways of being. But they were people ultimately with career ambitions. Many of those people went on to conventional careers.
Do you miss that “old” New York?
You’re never going to run out of New York, that’s for sure. And it’s up to you to find what it has to offer. I’m a great walker. I always have been. I will get the M4 bus and just get off wherever I want on its way up to the ends of the Cloisters and walk home. I am not going to find a new community, but I am going to feel New York at its New Yorkiest.
You said you were Warhol Factory-adjacent, but you were really a pop culture Zelig – working at the underground disco the 10th Floor and Max’s Kansas City. You were in the center of everything cool.
New York was a lot more porous. I write about these different tribes, the Halston tribe and the Calvin Klein tribe and the 10th Floor tribe and the Paradise Garage tribe and whomever, but they all, to some degree overlapped. They bled into each other. That was possible in a way that I can’t imagine it being possible now. You can’t even figure out where to go to meet a person, let alone the persons that are the ones that will change your life.
Your sister Dana’s death was painful. Were there things you wanted to leave out?
It’s not a memoir that really fits the term very well, because there’s not me in it. I don’t deflect. It is very much anchored in my voice and my experience, but my concern was to render things compassionately for everybody, self-included. I think that a lot of people who write memoirs or misery memoirs, there’s too much score settling. I’m not that person now. I once have been, but it just wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to produce.
It’s not a tell all and you don’t really get into your personal or romantic life.
Somebody said, you were like a reporter reporting on your own life. I have very much the habits of a reporter. I tend to keep parts of my life separate from my work life and a book is work. Every book isn’t going to tell everything, nor does it have to.
If your parents were alive, how do you think they would feel about Do Something?
That’s a very interesting question that nobody has asked. It’s hard for me to say. I made my peace with my father before he died in 2020, I suppose that he’s probably from the school: ‘as long as you spell my name correctly.’ My mom is hard. It’s very hard for me to sum it up what she may have felt about it. The book is very much anchored in my relationship to her
And your siblings?
I have this sister who committed a federal crime and went underground for five years. I didn’t see her for more than 20 years. After she’d gone to jail, she had a very conventional life. She lives in the Midwest. We exchange Christmas cards but were not able to restore the relationship.
You spent time with Dorian Corey, the drag star from “Paris is Burning” and the designer Charles James. Those wild characters don’t seem to exist in the city anymore. The fringe is not mainstream.
The book is in a lot of ways about finding teachers. They didn’t have to look like teachers. Nobody was going to see Dorian Corey and say, aha, there’s your guru. But it has been my good fortune as an unfettered kind of person to meet the right people for me. I never got any degrees or anything, but I think that I learned a lot from those people.
You were so young when you met many of these people.
The way that I was raised, I was basically like 40 at four. By the time I was 21, I felt I had it knocked, whatever it was, I could manage it, and it was only later that I could build back in the steps that I’ve missed largely through they say the encounters with such people as Anita Loos or Charles James or Dorian Corey or Willy Ninja. I guess the lessons can come from anywhere.
When you were at the Chelsea Hotel with Charles James, did you realize you were with someone who would end up being so influential?
Charles was not unaware of his own importance in the world, but at the same time he was living close to poverty and relative squalor.
Joan Didion is mentioned, but not by name.
I didn’t set out, in any sense, to write a name droppy book. I didn’t want to exploit the relationship with Joan. Joan was still living when I was working on the book, and she’s become a profit center for a lot of people. I met Joan through Lynn [Nesbit, Trebay’s agent], and we went on to become very, very close friends We had dinner once a week.
You could easily write a biography of Anita Loos or Charles James or Joan Didion.
I don’t know that I would like to write a biography, but I don’t feel as if this is the last thing I have to say about these people or that time. An interesting thing to me about journalism, that I’ve learned over the last 45 years, is that it’s so uneconomical as a line of work because you put so much into producing something that’s consumed so quickly. Books take a long time to write, but there’s so much more material than is useful to the central work. There is not only all the stuff I cut out of the manuscript, but there’s everything that surrounds that. Now I would look at those things and see them through a different lens. So, the answer is yes, I would certainly write more about those people.
Buy Do Something HERE
