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| The 1984 paperback edition of Eyes teases a different novel than the one Felice Picano wrote. |
It’s during that barbaric time when we blindly answered our landlines, with no caller I.D. to warn us of who was on the other end, that Felice Picano’s 1975 novel EYES is set.
That impulse to answer a ringing phone is what kicks off the story proper, when Stu Waehner, a twenty-something, New York City social worker, returns from his workday, after a shittier-than-usual subway commute, and hears his phone ringing on the other side of his locked apartment door. Thinking it might be his semi-estranged girlfriend Jennifer, Stu is positively desperate to get inside to take the call, yet he has as much difficulty unlocking his apartment door as a teen-aged girl has trying to start a car in a slasher movie:
“Coming,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his key chain.
The phone kept on ringing.
“Don’t hang up yet, Jenny. I’m coming…”
He had to switch everything to under the other arm—these locks had to be opened left-handed.
The phone was still ringing.
“Don’t hang up yet.” One lock. Now for the top one. It squealed, then seemed to be stuck. There it was. Now the long key for the police lock. There! The door swung inward, then abruptly stopped short after opening a few inches.
With the impact, everything under Stu’s arm fell to the hallway floor.
The police lock was stuck.
The phone kept ringing.
And the phone keeps ringing, until Stu finally makes it inside his apartment to answer it. It’s not Jennifer, but a woman asking for Bill. A fucking wrong number. Yet the woman calling doesn’t just apologize and end the call. Instead, she belligerently asks if Stu is sure no Bill lives in his apartment. Stu insists she has the wrong number, and then the woman takes issue with his justifiable annoyance. Remarkably, Stu does not just hang up, but continues arguing with the woman, who calls him a paranoiac and recommends a stay in Bellevue. The conversation just as quickly de-escalates, with Stu apologizing for yelling and the woman apologizing for having the wrong number, and readers just wondering why the hell didn’t either of them hang up the moment it was realized the woman misdialed.
But the woman hadn’t misdialed. Her whole plan was to get Stu on the phone and keep him on it. That woman is Johanna, a freelance editor, also in her twenties, who lives in the tenement across from Stu’s building, and who has a perfect view into Stu’s apartment from hers, and, with opera glasses in hand, has been watching him intently. She’s also struck up a casual friendship with Gladys, the retiree who lives in the unit below Stu’s, to get some insight and gossip about Gladys’ upstairs neighbor, and even encourages the old woman to badger Stu into adopting a stray cat/plot contrivance. She keeps a journal as well, detailing facts she’s learned about Stu—including his previous address and current employer—and her observations gleaned from spying on him (“He seems to have no close friends of ether gender.”)
For all Johanna’s learned about Stu, she is unprepared for him to have a girlfriend, and is dismayed when Jennifer, who had been touring with her dance company since before Stu moved into the apartment across the street, returns. Stu is a little disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Jennifer’s affections for Stu have cooled significantly in the time she’s been away, while her love for her career has intensified. Women’s Lib may have been in full swing when this book was written, but Stu still has a chauvinistic mindset, viewing Jennifer’s dancing more as a hobby than a career, not to mention he’s suspicious of her constantly praising her choreographer Caspar (he dismisses Caspar as a romantic rival, however, later referring to him as looking like “the Fairy Godmother”).
In Stu’s defense, Jennifer is a bit of a pretentious twat, always bitching about how small the apartment is and often taking shots at Stu for his lack of ambition. No wonder he’s receptive when Johanna, now using a voice changer and adopting a British accent, calls back. Stu pushes for a name (“You know my name, why not tell me yours?”) Johanna tells him to call her by any name he wants, horrified when he settles on Joan (Joan was so close to her own name, so uncannily close. As if… he’d intuited it or somehow knew and was teasing her.) Still, she endures the moniker as long as Stu keeps taking her calls.
Inevitably, Stu and Jennifer break up, leaving Stu’s evenings free to take Joan’s calls. “Does she get real dirty? You know, breathy and hot, all that kind of stuff?” asks Bill, Stu’s coincidentally named co-worker, after Stu tells him of his mysterious caller. Alas, she does not, and Stu never pushes their conversations in that direction, either. Though Johanna is romantically fixated on Stu, she’s not overtly horny for him. In fact, the one other time she’s done this phone-stalking thing—with the previous occupant of Stu’s apartment, a Texas dude named Colin—she presented herself in person shortly after establishing a rapport over the phone, appalled to discover that the guy immediately wanted pussy. Because of that unpleasant experience, Johanna wants to keep Stu at a safe distance, determined to establish not just an emotional connection, but a co-dependence as well.
That distance is jeopardized when a Joan slips up during one of their phone conversations and remarks on the whereabouts of Stu’s cat, revealing that she is, in fact, watching him. Stu, predictably, wonders from which of the many windows across the street Joan is spying on him.
Stu later brings home a young hippie chick he met a nearby park and doesn’t bother to pull down the shades before they do the nasty. He senses Joan is watching and is briefly troubled by the possibility before deciding, hey, if she wants to watch, he’ll give her a show (regretfully, said show is not explicitly described). Joan/Johanna is not pleased. “I’m very disappointed in Stu,” Johanna writes in her stalker journal. She later laments that she can’t even complain: Did she expect him to be faithful to strange woman on the telephone whom he never even met? It was her fault. She was the one who set the limits.
That all changes when Johanna accompanies her horny best friend Alice to the Hungry Hat, a restaurant/singles bar, to meet-up with Alice’s coke dealer, Bill, who’s sitting at the bar with his friend from work...Stu! Alice, who’s made Johanna her project (she’s already goaded Johanna into getting new clothes, updating her hairstyle and accepting a full-time job with a book publisher), sends Stu over to chat with her reclusive friend while she and Bill take care of their transaction. A mortified Johanna says she must leave, but neither Alice nor Stu will let her escape that easily. Ultimately, Johanna thaws enough to give Stu her work phone number.
To Johanna’s amazement, Stu is genuinely attracted to her, and a real, in-the-flesh romance blossoms. It’s a fantasy come true, but it’s also a problem. What to do with Joan? Things get especially awkward when Stu wants to discuss with Joan the wonderful new woman in his life: Johanna. Johanna decides the best way to dissolve this phone friendship—as well as find out what Stu’s true feelings are— is for Joan to become a jealous bitch, shit talking Stu’s new flame at every opportunity (“She didn’t strike me as being the picture of glowing femininity, but, after all, she’s probably just fine for a little therapeutic sex.”)
Joan’s snarky comments about his new girlfriend aren’t enough to drive Stu away, nor are they enough to kill his curiosity about her identity. It’s that curiosity—with help from a horny tomcat and one of Johanna’s neighbors—that’s going to get one of them killed.
Not the Book It’s Marketed As
Though it drags here and there, I found Eyes to be a fairly engaging read (I’ll forgive Picano’s inclusion of a feline ex machina). However, I was also mildly disappointed and for that I blame the book’s marketing, which teases a much different novel. “There are many ways to satisfy desire,” reads Dell Publishing’s teaser copy on the front cover of the 1984 paperback. “Some people dream. Some people watch. Some people kill.” My expectations were further manipulated by the ellipses-heavy synopsis on the back cover:
Day and night, a mysterious woman called, a voice from the darkness telling him she was all alone… that she wanted to talk to him… needed him…desired him…
Day and night, the eyes followed him, no matter what he did, whom he held, whom he kissed. And what the eyes saw would lead to love…and fear—and then to terror.
Because of the cover text, I was expecting something much more salacious: Joan/Johanna would be a dangerous psychopath. Her calls to Stu would be unsettling, even threatening, not to mention obscene. Stu would be more of a player, and all the women he brought home would ultimately end up dead. And when Stu discovers his new girlfriend Johanna is not just his harassing caller but the one who’s killed all the other women in his life, it would lead to a more intense confrontation.
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| Also, while the model used for the book cover suggests that Stu looks like Frank Stallone (left), going by Stu’s description in the book, he more closely resembles the 1979 Playgirl model on the right. |
Stu, though mildly chauvinistic and a bit of a homophobe, is also more nuanced than expected. He’s good at his job but not entirely sure he wants to make it his life’s work. When he and Jennifer break up, he doesn’t immediately hit the bars looking for sex (his sole hookup prior to meeting Johanna happens when that hippie chick casually offers herself, no strings attached, because 1970s). What Stu wants more than sex is someone to talk to, someone to be in his corner, and Joan fulfills that need.
Felice Picano wrote a few more mainstream thrillers after Eyes, his second novel, before becoming a prominent name in gay literature, publishing the queer-centric novels Late in the Season and Like People in History, as well as the memoirs Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel and Nights at Rizzoli. He even co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. Nearly twenty years ago I heard Picano speak at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, and among other topics he talked about the trap of writing genre fiction solely for commercial viability. Interestingly, I don’t recall him bringing up any of his work in genre fiction. I learned about that through the Too Much Horror Fiction blog. I haven’t read any of Picano’s gay books (well, I did skim through The New Joy of Gay Sex a few times at various bookstores when I thought no one was looking, but I was too deep in the closet at the time to even consider doing something so brave as buying it), but I was immensely curious about his early horror and thriller novels. Does the fact that I bypassed Picano’s acclaimed LGBTQ books in favor of what I thought (hoped) were his stabs at tawdry mainstream horror make me a self-loathing homo? No, just taste impaired.
I don’t think Picano is ashamed of his earlier books, nor should he be, but he clearly didn’t want to risk becoming a hack horror writer, and for a CisHet audience no less. Not that anyone would mistake Eyes as the work of a hack. Rather than the trashy erotic thriller Dell was hyping, Eyes is a more thoughtful story about loneliness, restlessness and alienation. That’s to the novel’s credit, but it’s also its biggest letdown.
BTW: According to his Wikipedia page, Picano wrote a screenplay adaptation for Eyes in 1985. The movie was never produced (1978-81 would’ve been the ideal time to have made the pitch), and now, thanks to technology rendering its primary device irrelevant, it likely never will be.
