Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

by Robert Stone

  shrug and a sigh. He had, Big Bob assured us, often appeared as the herald of smart people’s displeasure. The Inside Scoop gave employment to both the smart and the less so. With everyone imagining himself hip to the scene, in debt to bookmakers, dope dealers, loan sharks, and even honest creditors, with a vague lingering scent of long-ago shakedowns, blackmail, and violence, frictions developed that sometimes threatened to abrade and contuse. There was rather too much fraternization. Wives and girlfriends, husbands and boyfriends, were always getting in trouble and being thrown out. Sometimes they would seek refuge with other couples, which could compound everybody’s trouble. One melancholy example of misunderstanding involved three friends of mine and brought to bear all the increasingly unstable el- ements of the era: racial tension, the sexual revolution, and feminist autonomy. Reduced to its common denominators, however, it was no more than the eternal down-low shit, timeless at its core. X., a staff writer with the Scoop who rendered elegant, erudite, and delightfully ironical prose with a sophisticated Afro-American flavor, found himself temporarily unhoused. He was given refuge by Y. and Z., a husband and wife respectively, employees of the Scoop. All at once Y. found himself working overtime, taking over as chief editor, compelled to spend more and more time late in the office. Big Bob may have planned this as a sort of revenge (for something unknown) in depraved hope of the outcome, namely that unat- tended, Z. and X. would drift into a romantic liaison. So the out- come came out. One night Y. arrived home to confront a scene of dishonor, X. and Z. unclad, in bed. Y. was a hot-tempered man, somewhat over- weight, but not unfit for strenuous activity and surprisingly fast over short distances. He happened to own a staple gun, not your lit- 140 robert stone

  tle notebook stapler but a giant roofer’s staple gun, good for shoot- ing giant metal hooks to bind steel. Good, Y. thought, for shooting into X. to impress on him, or in him, Richie Construction’s princi- ple: You make a mistake, you gotta pay. X. comprehends the gestalt. He’s up and gone. Wisely, he has not paused to be stapled. Nor has he paused to dress. X. wears nothing but sharkskin loafers as, pursued by Y., with the big staple gun shooting barbed horseshoes at him that blast two-foot plaster craters in the hallway walls, he hurtles down the apartment building’s stairs. Once down, there remains only the street. It’s cold out. X. is wearing only his sharkskin loafers, nothing more. Y. flings himself down the stairs, still pursuing, still firing giant staples. X. has no choice but to flee through the winter streets, Y. gaining on him as he loses a loafer on the turn. There are few people out, it’s very late, it’s the Upper West Side. Dog walkers and such folk. They have nothing to say to the frantic, half-tumescent young black man running toward them. People scream. Behind X. lurches a hyperventilating fat man, waving what looks like a machine gun. It’s Y., something out of condition from all those late-night deli sandwiches eaten at his desk at the Scoop. The police, the old-type insensitive, unimaginative police, arrive. And there’s more, but no matter. It was all unfortunate, and very mischievous of Big Bob. The Inside Scoop provided a personal dimension that was not likely to be available at just any cheesy tabloid. One of the oddest of its homespun touches was the presence of Bob’s two sisters. They were actually sisters, Bob’s and each other’s, two of them, and though I would be hard put to render their job descriptions or even, at this passage, to remember each lady’s name, I will never forget their voices. This is because their voices, reading every writer’s story prime green: remembering the sixties 141

  aloud, were the usual vehicles of judgment at the Scoop. I will call them Grace and Maude, not their real names. Procedures differed from over at the Thunder. We composed some headlines, but we received assignments too. An assignment might come from Bob, from the sisters, or even from Richie Construction. Richie’s were tediously moralizing and spun themes around the same plot: People make a mistake for which they gotta pay. Failing to recognize Walter Winchell was a common faux pas in Richie’s fa- bles, or failing to recognize some button man and to render defer- ence. Richie did give us a nice story about two drunk capos di regimes having a live crab-eating contest at the Fulton Fish Market, scoop- ing the things right out of their barrel. This will suffice, I think, to illustrate why invented stories are so liberating and bright with pos- sibility, while the true shit keeps you bound to a fallen world. Bob himself liked a story of mine. It was invented, but in its per- versity and cruelty might well have been true. It goes like this: Man spends his life buying numbers tickets. Every day for fifty years he plays the bolito, blanks every time. One day—his birthday—he hits the big one. He calls his wife. She’s “Oh come home before some- thing happens!” He goes “Ha! I’m gonna celebrate.” Maybe he buys a beer at the corner. Maybe he goes to buy a lap dance. He comes out on the street, he’s giddy. Here comes the truck. Splat! What’s this in his bloody hand? Unreadable. The winning bug gets swept in the sewer, the birthday boy goes to the morgue. What Bob and Richie liked was my headline: HE’LL NEVER SPEND ADIME! They went around repeating it for days. “NEVER SPEND A DIME!” Losers couldn’t win was the whole of the law to those guys. The sisters, Maude and Grace, had similar attitudes. Of course, as women, their concerns were more sensitive to relationships, the emotions, the nuances of romance, the play of the errant heart. 142 robert stone

  One day Maude and Grace gave me an opportunity to prove my- self on their court, which was, finally, where the big decisions were made. They assigned me a story from the glory days of the old mag- azine, evoking the grand old times. They did it, I guess, to see if I was a true player. Few careers have identifiable low points. Shakespeare himself tells us: “the worst is not so long as we can say: this was the worst.” But this was bad. I was assigned a cover byline and a false identity. The best I can say of the project is that it was a kind of social investiga- tive story, to the extent that invented stories of no consequence about unreal and dead people can be called investigative. Anyway, it was an exposé, one where you pronounce the final e. My cover byline was Carmen Gutierrez. I was, Carmen was, “a sexy Latin showgirl.” The story was called RUBIROSA WAS A FIZZLE IN MY BED! Porfirio Rubirosa, as mercifully few will now remember, was a “playboy.” (See Playboy magazine for variations on the term. The word “playboy” had slightly obscene undertones when it was cur- rent, but nothing like the dirty diminutive infantilism it suggests now.) Rubi, as fellow trashy international socialites may be imag- ined addressing him, was a friend/creature or something of Winchell’s. And vice versa. He had supposedly represented the Do- minican Republic at the United Nations while that country was un- der the rule of the surreally sadistic General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Rubi was always in the columns, especially Winchell’s. Press agents for the splashy nightclubs of the time, the Stork, the Copa, El Morocco, constantly reported his dancing away the nights at their establishments, whirling successions of heiresses and celebrities until dawn. As presented, Rubi was to be envied in every way, but the subtext prime green: remembering the sixties 143

  was his prowess as an indefatigable lover. People like Richie and Bob and the guys who ate live crabs at the Fulton Fish Market would dis- cuss what they had heard were his techniques. One was to keep one hand up to the wrist in the iced champagne bucket to delay orgasm. All over New York, parochial-school freshmen, Navy recruits, ap- prentices at the Metallic Lathers Union were filing that one away to use when they took Zsa Zsa to the Pierre and someone showed them an ice bucket. Thus, the given was Rubi’s well nigh mystical prolongations, the whisper current in every high-tone powder room, the very prospect of which cast beautiful women of every conceivable eminence at his feet. I, however, knew better! I, Carmen Gutierrez, author of the Scoop’s exposay, was going to set the world straight! Maude and Grace oversaw as I rolled the sheet into my type- writer. I had not thought that it would come to this. Every life, every career, has its lowest point. I was hoping this would be mine. RUBIROSA, I typed somberly, WAS A FIZZLE IN MY BED! By Carmen Gutierrez. “Do you really think ‘fizzle’?” I asked Maude. She h
ad written the headline for me. “Don’t you think something else...” “ ‘Fizzle’!” she told me. “I want ‘fizzle’! ‘Fizzle’ says it!” Fizzle, right. I will pass over, forget, those writerly tropes I employed to breathe life into Carmen. Let’s call her a Latin Bombshell. Irrepress- ible! Volatile. Enthusiastic. And Fun! Oh, and when she got a load of Rubi, ay ay ay! Handsome? Caramba! That’s how Carmen was. An original. There followed volleys of innuendo and cute euphemism to the effect of my—Carmen’s—disillusionment, repeated until my hand 144 robert stone

  began to wither and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I handed the copy to Maude for the showdown. Maude walked with a cane. She was stocky and blue haired. She would spend all her time at the end of a blond table next to a pile of legal pads. I watched her eye the story. Everyone in the shop grew silent. Then Maude threw back her head and gave voice. She read the title in a voice of pleasant expectation. She carried on with the lead, in the same tone. She was beaming. I was very ashamed. So awallow in humiliation and self-pity was I that I failed to notice that at a certain point in the narrative her voice had begun to trail off. Her reading began to sound like a tape recorder with its battery running down. Or, as we used to say, a record at the wrong speed. She kept looking between the sheets in her hand and me, as though I were out of my mind. This annoyed me, since it had hardly been my idea to pose as Carmen Gutierrez, and express wry disap- pointment at the manhood of an elderly Dominican. Everyone else was equally silent. Maude was shaking her head. Across the office, X., the thief of hearts, restored to his clothes and safe from Y.’s re- venge, and Richie Construction were laughing at my annoyance. After fixing me with a snakefish eye, Maude pretended to make an effort to read more. It seemed heavy going. She put a hand to her throat as though her vocal cords were seizing up. Then she gave up and simply stared at me. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “I mean, that’s what you asked for.” She exchanged a look with her sister Grace and shook her head in silent hopeless denial. “Kid,” she said. “Aw, kid.” Kid was what she called me, although I was practically thirty. “What, for God’s sake?” prime green: remembering the sixties 145

  “What?” she raised her voice and nearly shouted at me. “Put some pizzazz in it! That’s what! Put some pizzazz in it.” I felt like Raskolnikov contemplating the value of Kempskaya’s life, the scant reasons for enduring the old woman’s continued existence. “All right,” I said. “I’ll run it through again.” I kept my eyes on the paper in the roller. Clickety clack clack I go. After what seemed an hour, I had hacked my way through another take on the idiotic polo-playing skirt-happy impotent son of a bitch and his ditzy unsatisfied muchacha. Once again I handed it to Maude. This time Sister Grace intercepted. “Let me try it,” she said. So she did. In a voice that was softer and more high-pitched than her sister’s, she began to read aloud from my tale of Rubi and Carmen, star-crossed sensualists denied their full measure of amor. Grace’s reading had a tone of naive sweetness, whereas Maude’s rendering had been world-weary and wry. All the same, trying to look as though I were paying no attention, I became aware of Grace’s flagging efforts. She had started out all delightfully, full of merry brio and guileless clarity, as warmly confidential as the liver pill salesman on The Romance of Helen Trent. All at once her jaw seemed to thicken. The words dragged on without inflection. It seemed one sentence had no connection to another. Carmen’s worldly insights were rendered in leaden, labored syllables. Finally, her reading stopped as though borne down by its weight. She seemed to struggle for breath. It was as though she tried to go on but failed. Then she shook her head, trying to catch my eye and de- liver the same bad news her sister had pronounced. “Kid, Jeezus Christ. That ain’t it!” Big Bob spoke from the raised desk where he presided. “Would yez tell him,” he asked Grace, “to put some pizzazz in it?” She seemed stunned by the convergence of insights. 146 robert stone

  “This is what I’m telling him, Bob!” She fixed on me. “Kid,” she said, “you got to put some pizzazz in it.” Reimagining Rubi and Carmen, once more visualizing their scented love chamber, I wanted to make them die, just as surely as I wanted to make Grace and Maude and Big Bob and smiling Richie Construction die, howling in the land of Bosch’s garden. How could I write of love, or even unconsummated concupiscence, when all I knew were bitterness and rage? I was playing Cupid for these damned perverted defunct conceits, an organ grinder’s monkey with a typewriter. I was flashing horrid cupids, grotesque putti with tat- toos and crossbows. I was working for Big Bob and the Inside Scoop and I’d be doing it for the rest of my worthless dime-a-line life. But I finished the stupid thing. Every phrase, I knew, was pre- cisely what she wanted. I waited, trembling with anger, for her crone’s voice to croon fatuous approval. It had been an act of immo- lation. I felt as though I had shoved my own pen down my throat. But it was as required. Grace took the four pages and read through them. This time through, though, she was silent. Her face betrayed no response. Af- ter going over the copy deliberately, she passed it to her sister. Maude read it as well and also, curiously, in silence. I watched them whisper together. I was, finally, openly interested. Maude and Grace turned matching senescent smiles on me. They shook their round balding heads in a unity of rejection. Grace was the elder, I think; she leaned forward. “This is just filth,” she said. prime green: remembering the sixties 147

  TWELVE The culture war got meaner as the world got smaller. Ginsberg and Kerouac, in the fifties, had been set upon by illiterate fea- ture writers concocting insulting lies about their personal hy- giene and reporting the clever wisecracks that famous people were supposed to have delivered at their expense. Now the drug thing was being used to make the wrongos feel the fire. At the end of the fifties, Cassady, who was not exactly the Napoleon of crime, had done two years in San Quentin for sup- posedly selling a few joints. Sometime after Kesey’s return to California, in 1965, his house in La Honda was raided during a

  Prime Green : Remembering the Sixties

  party. The native country he had just visited in such state was biting back. Ken and some friends were charged with possession of nar- cotics. Then, on a San Francisco rooftop one foggy night, while watching the Alcatraz searchlight probe the bay’s radius, he was ar- rested again on the same charge. At this, he and his friends com- posed a giggly, overwrought suicide note addressed to the ocean. (“O Ocean,” it began, grimly omitting the h to indicate high seri- ousness and despair.) Fleeing south, Kesey made it to the same area in Mexico where Ram Dass and other such prototypical acid cranks had conducted their early séances. In New York I got a telegram that declared “Everything is begin- ning again,” an Edenic prospect I had no power to resist. I had fi- nally finished my novel, but it would not be published for a year, and I was at the time employed by what our lawyers called “a weekly tabloid with a heavy emphasis on sex.” I had not published anything much beyond “Skydiver Devoured by Starving Birds” and “Wed- ding Night Trick Breaks Bride’s Back,” fables of misadventure and desperate desire for the distraction of the supermarket browser. Nev- ertheless, I was the only person Esquire magazine could find who knew where Kesey was. By then, his work and his drug-laced adven- tures in a transforming San Francisco were well known. Esquire paid my way south. It was the autumn of 1966 and Ken, Faye, their children, and some of their friends were staying near Manzanillo. In 1966, the Pa- cific coast between Zihuatanejo and Puerto Vallarta did not look the way it looks today. The road ran for many miles along the foot of the Sierra Madre, bordering an enormous jungle crowned by the Colima volcano itself. The peak thrust its fires nearly four thousand meters into the clouds. At the edge of the mountains, the black-and-white sand beach was so empty that you could walk for hours without 150 robert stone

  passing a town, or even the simplest dwelling. The waves were deaf- ening, patrolled by laughing gulls and pelicans. Today Manzanillo is Mexico’s biggest Pacific port and the center of an upscale tourist area. In those days, it seemed like the edge of the world, poor and beau
tiful beyond belief. One of the hotels in town advertised its elevator on a sandwich board outside. Man- zanillo’s commanding establishment was a naval base that supported a couple of gunboats. The Keseys’ home was a few miles beyond the bay in a complex of three concrete buildings with crumbling roofs, partly enclosed by a broken concrete wall. We called one of the buildings the Casa Pu- rina. Despite its chaste evocations, the name derived from the place’s having once housed some operation of the Purina company, world- wide producers of animal feed and aids to husbandry. In the shel- tered rooms, we stashed our gear and slung our hammocks. We occupied our time seeking oracular guidance in the I Ching and pur- suing now vanished folk arts like cleaning the seeds from our mari- juana. (Older heads will remember how the seeds were removed from bud clusters by shaking them loose onto the inverted top of a shoebox. Since the introduction of seedless dope, this homely craft has gone the way of great-grandma’s butter churn.) Our landlord was a Chinese-Mexican grocer, who referred to us as “existencialistas,” which we thought was a good one. He provided electricity, which enabled us to take warm showers and listen to Wolfman Jack and the Texaco opera broadcasts on Saturday. No trace remained, fortunately, of whatever the Purina people had been up to between those whitewashed walls. We were an unstable gathering, difficult to define. The California drug police, whatever they were called at that time, professed to be- lieve that we were a gang of narcotics smugglers and criminals, our prime green: remembering the sixties 151