by Sanders, Ed
Harry’s drawing on a stencil, 1964. One of three occult stencils, from the author’s archive.
Underground Films
I began hanging out on the underground film scene. It had been Mekas’s Guns of the Trees that had inspired me to publish a mimeographed magazine, so I continued showing up at various Mekas-run film events. At a screening I met Andy Warhol. Henry Geldzahler, curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, introduced me to him. Finally the inspiration of Jonas Mekas and the Film-Maker’s Cooperative made me decide to acquire a 16 mm camera. I went to my friend Harry Smith for advice.
Harry urged me to purchase a so-called “battle camera, like, the kind they used filming the war.” He specifically recommended a used Bell and Howell model 70-DE, which would be sturdy enough to withstand a few drops and bangs. I went out to search and bought one at a camera store called Willoughby’s on West Thirty-second Street.
A Stedi-Rest, from my archives.
Harry also recommended that I purchase a device shaped like a large seven, called a Stedi-Rest, which greatly aided handheld camerawork. The Stedi-Rest enabled a filmmaker to avoid nervous jerks and quakes during filming. The camera was screwed into the top of the “seven,” and the arms of the Stedi-Rest pushed against the stomach and on the shoulder by means of curved cushioned supports that were built on the ends of the large seven, perpendicular to the ends. With the torso supporting the camera’s weight, the hands were relatively free to move about, the camera was much less likely to be dropped, and it was always more or less in position, ready to be used.
I met filmmaker Stan Brakhage at a screening at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and received from him a wonderful lecture on how properly to use my new Bell and Howell. Stan advised me to carry around my camera wherever I went, to forget about loading it with film for a while, and to practice ten hours a day for a few weeks “filming” things I observed, especially heavy action, like fights, crowds forming in the park, angry truck drivers, and police raids. The point, he emphasized, was to be able to stay cool under all circumstances. Stan advocated a rigorous program of physical exercise. “A moviemaker should be in as good a shape as any other athlete,” he said. He should be able to twist, contort, lean slowly forward while sinking to the knees, bend backward, all the while keeping the camera exactly steady, smoothly filming the action. A cameraperson should be able to walk through a scene of grisly riot, chaos, or site of violence, the camera running, following the action in a smooth flowing riverine motion.
A Bell and Howell battle camera, with turret to hold three different lenses, very similar to the one I purchased
Help from Jonas Mekas
Jonas was very generous. He loaned his Bolex to Barbara Rubin to make Christmas on Earth, to Ron Rice to shoot The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, to Jack Smith to make Normal Love, and to other filmmakers. He located a source of very inexpensive film for me. I was told that the film came from the air force or perhaps the black market, that it had originally been in big rolls, and that a blind man in a darkroom had peeled off three-minute or one-hundred-foot sections. I purchased a bunch of cans. He also located a place that would develop my various film projects, some of which were spackled with balling, blow jobs, and hookahs, plus my footage of things such as the Great March on Washington and my brother’s innocent Missouri wedding.
The Rise of Warhol as a Filmmaker
I agreed with Ted Berrigan that Andy Warhol was a genuine American art force. Andy Warhol started making films in the summer of ’63, a series of “Kiss” films, starring a woman filmmaker and various kiss-mates. These were followed by the six-hour film Sleep, of a man sleeping, and Eat, forty-five minutes of artist Robert Indiana chowing down on a mushroom. Mekas showed these early Warhol experiments at the Gramercy Arts Theater. Mekas was cameraman for Warhol’s eight-hour “study” of the Empire State Building.
Sending an Issue to Ginsberg in India
I obtained addresses of literati from Ted Wilentz, who with his brother, Eli, owned and operated the 8th Street Bookshop, then located on Eighth Street where it intersected with MacDougal Street. Ted had an apartment on the floor above the shop and used to hold regular literary soirées.
The 8th Street Bookshop was pivotal to a young poet in those days. It was at the 8th Street that I first saw a book of photos from Dachau, first met poets such as Joel Oppenheimer, first spotted Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and the Auerhahn Press edition of Maximus from Dogtown—I. It was there I monitored little magazines such as Yugen and Kulchur and where I first purchased Allen Ginsberg’s epochal Kaddish and Other Poems.
Ted Wilentz gave me Edward Dahlberg’s address, plus Samuel Beckett’s and Allen Ginsberg’s. I had heard Ginsberg was feeling depressed in India. I sent him an issue and asked for some poems.
The issue I sent to Allen Ginsberg in India, 1963, asking for poetry.
It inspired him, he later told me—for he had indeed been depressed—and helped him out of his depression. A few weeks after my letter, he sent me the poem “The Change.”
While I was experimenting with underground films and publishing my magazine, I started taking classes again at New York University, where I was working in the purchasing department. As an employee of NYU, I could take courses for free. I was studying and translating Virgil’s Aeneid with Dean Paul Culley at NYU, meeting him during my lunch hour at his office.
The Children of Birmingham
In a way 1963 was one of the most vicious years. In retrospect, I see that the dangers to the presidency should have been more than apparent. In a way JFK was surrounded by the grrrs of the right.
Much of the anger of the right derived from the civil rights movement, which I monitored fairly carefully from the Lower East Side. That spring there was a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, against the almost total segregation of restrooms, drinking fountains, and public facilities. Many hundreds were arrested, including Martin Luther King, who had announced that he would lead rallies there until “Pharaoh lets God’s people go.”
On May 2 and 3, 1963, over a thousand children marched for freedom. They came out of the 16th Street Baptist Church two by two singing, “We Shall Overcome,” with high-energy clapping. Some were as young as six. Head policeman Bull Connor unleashed biting and snarling German shepherds on the demonstrators, recalling the days of the Nazis. The world’s response was revulsion and derision. The police sprayed the children with what were called “monitor guns,” contraptions that linked two hoses through a single nozzle mounted on a tripod. The guns had such force that innocent children rolled down the street as if from a flooded creek. It was a time of evil. Many in the Lower East Side community were very angry.
On May 12 John Kennedy ordered 3,000 federal troops to Birmingham. It gave us great hope to know we had a president who might actually help end segregation.
Quang Duc
On June 10, in an image of horror that stunned a generation, especially my friends in the nonviolent direction-action movement, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc, sitting in lotus position on a street in Saigon, burned himself to death as the ultimate protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the right-wing Catholic Diem regime. Between June and October seven monks, known as bonzes, burned themselves. Madame Nhu, wife of Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother, liked the blazes. She called the immola-tions “barbecues.”
The violence in Birmingham and the violence in Vietnam had an impact on the rising counterculture of the Lower East Side. It made us all the more willing to work for great change.
Al Fowler
I felt certain that I had discovered an American poetic genius. His name was Al Fowler. Fowler came to my New Year’s Eve party 1961–’62 and we became friends. He was in the army, stationed in nearby Fort Jay. I gradually became aware of his talents as a poet and started publishing his work in Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. During the magazine’s thirteen issues I published twenty-seven poems by Al Fowler, including one three-pager and one five-pager
.
He became famous in antiwar and pacifist circles in early ’62 when the Living Theater had sponsored a World Wide General Strike for Peace, and Fowler had picketed the ferry landing leading to his army base at Ft. Jay in full uniform. He was tossed out of the army after the General Strike, and he began a career as a dealer in amphetamine. He was so good at it, he announced, that “now I can afford to be a junkie.” The logic of that escaped my youthful dazzlement over his talents as a poet.
He hailed from Albany, New York, where he had composed the senior class poem in 1957 and won a National Merit Scholarship for the quality of his noggin. By the early ’60s Fowler had joined a small sect, the “Free Catholic Church,” and now and then sported a clerical collar, a big silver cross on his chest, and a round red anarchist button on the lapel of his frock coat. This later figured in his marginal involvement in the brouhaha regarding Lee Harvey Oswald’s reported appearance in Greenwich Village prior to the assassination.
The Beginning of Filming
Meanwhile, I began shooting footage, mainly of my friends, some of which had erotic qualities. I had a bunch of ideas for films. I was concerned about Al, who, although he had become a junkie and was fascinated with the culture of heroin, expressed a desire to kick. I wrote a film scene in which a huge “OD [Overdose] Centipede” attacked him, and then I proposed shooting footage of an Egyptian Death Barge, copied from the tombs of the Nile, sailing with Fowler arrayed in fu-nerary splendor out into the waters between Manhattan and Staten Island.
Sketches of Al Fowler by Ann Leggett. From the author’s archive.
Fowler developed a close relationship with artist Ann Leggett. Ann was a young woman with a gleam of experimentation in her eye and a talent that was undeniable. She was twenty-two and studying at the Art Students League. Though not a Catholic, she was drawn to the Catholic Worker, where she had met Al Fowler. She had spent a few days at the House of Detention for joining with the Catholic Workers in refusing to take shelter during New York City’s compulsory civil defense drill on May Day in the early ’60s. In March 1963 she had an exhibition of her paintings at the Columbia University School of Architecture. She, too, was swept up in the ambience of the swashbuckling young poet from Albany. She made some memorable drawings of Fowler during those years, including one that showed him muscular and defiantly shooting up.
Then there was a murmur of trouble amid the defiance. Fowler was having more and more difficulty supporting his habit, and he was drifting into robberies. Right around the spring of’63 a customer of Al’s, an NYU student I used to see at Al’s apartment wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons and penny loafers, died of an overdose. It was a bugle wake-up call.
The Kick Grid
It seemed obvious that Al Fowler wanted to kick heroin, so I helped organize a bunch of our mutual friends to sit with him as he gradually reduced his heroin shots until he was free. I called it a Kick Grid, dividing the time flow into four-hour units. Years later I wrote a short story about it in Tales of Beatnik Glory.
Fowler lived in a building on East Ninth just off Avenue B. A group of his friends lived in the same building. One of them, let’s call her Amber, had a weekly client, one of the Cassini brothers famous in the fashion business, for whom she sank to her knees as he stood in his office, and he wanted each knee to rest on his tasseled shoes, left to right, right to left, and then a blow job. It was good money. Her husband was a junkie friend of Al’s named Keith. I remember seeing him quite glassy-eyed during the days of the Kick Grid.
I divided up Al’s heroin supply into smaller and smaller amounts and kept the skag away from him, doling out the amounts. First Al shot up a half dose, then a quarter dose, then an eighth, then nothing. Everything went okay until Fowler became sweaty and junk sick and very uncomfortable. For the next twenty-four hours the ordeal was acute. That night was the worst. Fowler lay sweating beneath a blanket. Light hurt his eyes, so we kept the pad gloomy.
There was a contention raised in Naked Lunch that kickers experience a period of intense sexual desire during the turkey. This seemed to have occurred for Fowler, though I could not see for total surety in the demi-dark. Buck’s County Lucy came over to visit Fowler, who was in sad shape, sobbing and sweating, his eyeglasses wet and foggy. Lucy, jean shirt tied at the stomach, put her arms around Fowler and asked if he wanted something to drink. Fowler whispered something to her and pulled her down into his rumpled lair. It was hard to view exactly because Fowler pulled his Mexican blanket over both of them. She skinnied out of her shorts and pulled aside the elastic of her panties and steered him inside her, then fell forward to kiss. It was only a matter of seconds before Fowler’s junk-sick spews came forth, and he moaned thanks aplenty to his kind friend.
Later that night I awakened to hear a beating sound. What was it? It was Fowler beating his head against the wall in junk-sick agony. Fowler began to beg me for dope: “Just a little shot. Please!” Beseeching.
I gave in to Fowler, allowing him to shoot up “just a taste, man, a taste.” The result was like a change from night to day, for as soon as he shot up, Fowler stopped sweating and walked around smiling and talking.
I vowed from then on, no more skag. Finally I caught him alone shooting up some skag from a secret stash under the linoleum in his living room.
During the course of the Kick Grid I’d brought my Speed-o-Print mimeo and some reams of colored Granitex paper to Fowler’s pad, and I spent hours running off a hundred copies each of the first six issues of F.Y.
After I had discovered his secret stash of heroin under the ancient linoleum and admonished him, the Kick Grid worked to its conclusion. But it wasn’t clear that he had actually kicked.
Meanwhile, I had just purchased my Bell and Howell camera and was eager to get going as an underground filmmaker. As I have mentioned, one of my first ideas for a film starred Al, whether he had actually kicked or not.
Here’s the text I wrote for the scene in the Fowler movie in which the OD Centipede invades and seizes him and then his body in a Death Boat (which I intended to build) floats out from the area of the Staten Island Ferry while a chorus chants:CLACK CLACK CLACK
the CENTIPEDE
O.D. with a hundred legs
crawls through the door
light through the window. . . .
Death to the Reverend Fowler
to the reverend death
Slash through the door
gnashing lips the Centipede death
who takes him
over the sunrise with its leering lips
No redemption
No redemption
No redemption
from the evil and sin
no redemption
from the hate and the horror
No redemption
No redemption
The centipede
eats up the man
and the dead man knows no heat
before the sun be his
in the course of the Barge of Death
(low whisper, rising)
hustle hustle hustle hustle hustle
hustle
hustle hustle hustle
butcher butcher butcher
lift him to the lips
red blood of a slimy hate
know the frenzy
spit the blood
retch the gobble
munch the word in a Gobble
Gobble Gobble
Gobble Gobble Gobble Gobble
Gobble
Gobble Gobble
The author holding his Bell and Howell at Bobbie and Robert Creeley’s house in New Mexico. Image courtesy of Bobbie Louse Hawkins.
Renting the Secret Location in the Lower East Side
In August 1963 I rented a small two-room apartment at 203 Avenue A for $27.49 a month to use as my “Secret Location” for the Fuck You Press and as a studio for the making of underground films. The apartment was located in a small back building, so it was perfect for secrecy. It had direct-current electri
city, so any appliance with a motor could not be operated.
The apartment was on the second floor. Poet Clive Matson, who had told me the little pad was available, lived on the floor above me, and later writer Bonnie Bremser, then married to poet Ray Bremser, lived in Matson’s apartment while Ray was serving a prison sentence.
Rent Control!
It was a rent-controlled pad! On November 1, 1943, the federal Office of Price Administration, under pressure from tenant groups, froze rents in New York City. At the end of the war tenant groups arose again to prevent unaffordable increases. Governor Thomas Dewey and Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York City imposed a system of rent control on all buildings constructed before 1947. The state legislature renewed the rent controls every three years, a system still in place in the 1960s that helped make artistic effort in New York City a thing of glory—such as my Secret Location in the Lower East Side for $27.49 a month!
“Jack Smith Decor” for the Secret Location
On Orchard Street I purchased “Jack Smith/Flaming Creatures decor”—that is, long pieces of wildly colored cloths, some gold threaded and with patterns of flowers, which I hung from all the walls of the bedroom/filming room at the Secret Location. I strung wires along the top of the walls from which I dangled the cloths to give a harem, wild-color hallucination effect. Then I attached clip-on fixtures with photofloods here and there around the room, focusing the light on the ornately covered mattress on the floor.
