The Perfect Childhood.

Acclaimed as it was, Tulsa got Larry Clark's career off on a curious foot. For it seemed not the work of an artist versed in post-Conceptualism, but of a documentarian--a more subculturally directed Robert Frank, a subtler Wee Gee. Although intensely beautiful, the images were disguised by their settings' unfamiliarity and sexual heat. Initially, it was only those of us who actually haunted such locales who could feel the extraordinary, indescribable estheticism radiating off them. That's my guess. Back when crystal meth ran my daily affairs, when each day's goal involved fierce, disorganized sex with a broke, drug-addicted white-trash teenager who wouldn't or couldn't possibly read my elaborate interest in his body as anything but one of the more confusing aspects of his job, I used to see this one young guy, Mike, on a regular basis. Mike was a scrawny hippie-type with a pretty, pockmarked face and lost-seeming eyes that I believe were pale blue. Very much like the type you see in early Larry Clarks. I forget how we met. He'd come over a lot, hang out. We would drug ourselves into an insane mental and physical state, then have sex, if you want to call it that. To Mike, I was a representative of the real, normal world. He thought that if he could keep men like me interested in his body, then his life would have a conventional purpose. That was important to him, same as it's important to you and me. Because, yeah, when Mike wasn't trading the use of his orifices for drugs or petty cash, he was just one more manic-depressive layabout. Or that's how he described himself, in so many words. My interest in him was intense but specific, and even kind of worshipful within limits. Anyway, one day when our sex had been especially great, and we thought we were in love or something, Mike hung around afterwards for a few hours, and, over their course, he happened to pull my copy of Larry Clark's second book, Teenage Lust, off the shelf. He sat in the middle of my bedroom, looking and relooking through the pictures. I was just lying around in bed snorting crystal and watching him, thinking who remembers what thoughts? Eventually Mike glanced up from the pages, all astonished, and asked me, "What is this?" Really, like Teenage Lust was some bizarre new invention. So I explained what I knew about Larry Clark, his work, his world, etc. Mike nodded along, growing increasingly excited. He couldn't seem to believe that the desperate, extreme way in which he conducted his life--Mike's life closely resembled the lives chronicled in Clark's work--could be contextualized as art, for one thing, and, more important, that somebody in the real, normal world had been impressed enough by guys like him to "upgrade" their lives into works of art, to use his term. Because to Mike, art was the ultimate sign that something was significant. If there was art about something, that thing had earned its keep in the world. I don't know where he got this idea. So I gave him the book, and he managed not to sell it for drug money longer than almost anything else among his belongings. Eventually he died, at 24. O.D.'ed, from what I hear. I don't mean to sound cold, but it's been years now, and my life is so different. By the time Mike died, he'd become a mental and physical wreck who could do nothing but annoy everyone he knew. Still, there were a couple of years when he was weirdly beautiful, and unconventionally intelligent, and I thought he'd wind up okay. He wanted to be a rodeo star, whatever that entails. I've stopped befriending and sleeping with guys like Mike. For one thing, it's too painful to watch them try to exist in so much pain. And it's scary to objectify white-trash street-hustler types to the degree to which you must in order to find them beautiful enough to go to bed with. Luckily there are works of art that explore guys like Mike, because photographing someone nails him down but leaves him free. In a way, I wish I'd never had sex with Mike, because I still get these tastes of him, meaning his body, on the people I do go to bed with, even though they're nothing like him. And then that makes me think of Mike, which is a mixed blessing. Sometimes, as stupid as it sounds, I feel like my mouth is Mike's fossil, which wouldn't be so terrible, except that his memory hurts, and I'm not into pain anymore, or not in the way I was. In Larry Clark's The Perfect Childhood, he has taken the most sublime pictures of his career, and there's no one like Mike anywhere in them.

Dennis Cooper is a writer who lives in Los Angeles. His most recent novel, Try, appeared this spring for Grove.