by Richard Hell
When I got back to school, things just didn’t seem right. It was a moment when choosing to go a certain direction was almost an aesthetic decision. How could I resume school? It would ruin the future memory. I didn’t realize this for a few days though. It came like an inspiration that had been rising below the surface, the way it might dawn on a trained animal that it could actually just leave the yard.
“Let’s take off,” I said. Tom agreed.
We thought we’d head south. We had enough pocket money to get train tickets to DC, and then we could begin hitchhiking.
CHAPTER FIVE
We were heading for Florida. We didn’t know anybody there, or know anything about the place except that it was warm and airy, and there was plenty of citrus fruit and seafood, and girls who smelled like suntan lotion and had little particles of sand on them here and there, including inside the waistbands of their panties. We would be fugitive poets they’d care for.
Those days on the road, escaped from school with Tom, gave me the strongest dose yet of my favorite feeling: of leaving myself behind for another world. There are a lot of ways to get that feeling. A drug can do it; so can a new type of work, or falling in love, or just changing your appearance; but actually taking off and abandoning all your previous identity’s responsibilities and history and relationships is probably the most pure and exhilarating.
There’s one simple, seemingly innocuous experience that’s emblematic of that 1966 school runaway for me, an experience that was new and was enabled by our escape: simply to sit in a diner in the darkest depths of the night drinking coffee with a friend. For many years it kept its potency, and for most of those years that friend was Tom. There’s an eternal, godlike feeling to sitting with a good friend in the middle of the night, speaking low and laughing, lazily ricocheting around in each other’s minds, eyes a little fuzzy and stinging maybe, sipping the flavorful, stimulating sugary hot milky coffee, voices hoarse, the restaurant’s harsh light isolating you inside the rampant darkness beyond the windows.
I don’t know if I can quite get back to our states of consciousness to describe the pleasure of those days after we took off from school. In one sense they provided a template for the future, but in another way they’re irretrievable. We were sixteen and seventeen (Tom wouldn’t turn seventeen until December—I was almost three months older), and we were tall and skinny and gawky, with our wrists always poking out of our sleeves. Everything was a lark, and also a tentative exploration, since so much we were doing we were doing for the first time. We were always looking for laughs, and our egos were undeveloped, so we could laugh at each other and ourselves almost without limit and hardly any behavior was out of bounds. We liked to act like idiots, we sincerely identified with bums on the street, and we were drunk with our new freedom.
For some reason we brought out a sense of ridiculousness in each other at the same time that we felt like artists, like people living in order to plumb life and to get by on our wits. But it was a crime to take anything too seriously, as oppressed as we felt by the adult and conventional world. All the most serious art is not only sad but hilarious. What other intelligent way to live is there but to laugh about it? The alternative, also respectable, is suicide. But how could you do that? Not only would it betray a woeful lack of humor, but it would keep you from finding out what was going to happen next.
We hardly stopped in DC but took off hitchhiking from there. I’d contacted some Sayre friends to say I’d be slipping through Lexington, and one of them offered a vacant little farmhouse out in a vegetable field near town where Tom and I could stay for a few days. It was furnished but there was no phone or utilities or food, and of course we didn’t have a car. At one point, we had nothing to eat but the raw corn and beans we could scavenge from the crop rows. But we were treated like heroes when my friends came by.
Just before we left, they threw us a party, and, during it, I finally got to have two-person sex again. I barely knew the girl, but she was pretty and we both got drunk. It felt like how it must be for a soldier going off to war, or a rock star who deserves love for his type of noble sacrifice. We got the only bedroom to ourselves while people were drinking and shouting in the other rooms. It was dark in the bedroom, but I was so greedy that I asked her to let me look between her naked legs with a flashlight and she agreed, the goddess.
Tom and I started hitchhiking south again. Soon we’d made it pretty far, to southeastern Alabama, only a short distance from Florida. It was cold there in the middle of the October night. We stood along a two-lane road that wound through the fields and piney woods. Traffic was sparse but twice cars had slowed and pulled over just in order to speed off as we ran up, redneck kids hooting at us. We decided to wait out the dark down in the stubble of harvested crops beyond the road. We gathered brush and twigs and branches and made a little campfire.
We got giddy, cursing the natives and provoking each other, and started flinging burning sticks around the field. We hadn’t particularly intended it but pretty soon a few patches here and there caught fire. We levitated in our power. I don’t know what we might have done next, but suddenly we were surrounded by the police. There was a fire truck too, and the cops had dogs. We claimed to be Florida college kids but there was an alert out for the missing schoolboys. They arrested and jailed us and called our parents.
We’d been gone about two weeks. At home, it turned out that this time the school wouldn’t keep me; we were expelled.
Tom decided to continue in public school in Wilmington, but I couldn’t turn back. I needed to make my own life. I realized that the most fertile site for that was New York City, but I was a minor and my mother reminded me she could call the police if I left. I didn’t think she would call the police, but I proposed a deal—I’d agree to attend the awful Norfolk high school until I could earn $100 as a stake for myself, if she wouldn’t report me when I left. (In 1966, $100 was worth about $700 in 2012 money.) The federal minimum wage back then was $1.25 an hour—so, working part-time after school, it would take me weeks to earn the money. I knew she thought that because I was irresponsible and lazy I wouldn’t be able to hold a job that long, or even that I wouldn’t have the persistence to find one. She finally had to concede the terms, and I found a job right away working after school in a storefront newsstand downtown that specialized in porn.
School was a joke. In English class we were being taught the forms of correspondence we might need to know to take our places in society. When we were assigned to write a sample birthday-present thank-you note, mine read:
November 18, 1966
Dear Betty,
Thank you very much for your thoughtful gift, The Wit of De Sade. Our entire family laughed aloud at the rollicking humor of the “merry marquis.”
No one came to my birthday party, but I had a great deal of fun blowing out the candles after I lit them.
Thanks again for the delightful book.
Gratefully yours,
Richard
For the sample job-application letter I sought a position as defecator in a fertilizer factory.
After school I was reading Dylan Thomas. For years, later, I was embarrassed to admit he’d inspired me. He was so overwrought and “poetic,” his language all biblical and astronomical and anatomical (saviors, radium, sun, tongues, fountains, nerve, bone), and concerned with big dramatic subjects, even if the poems didn’t really make intellectual sense but were more like music. Whereas the New York poets I eventually came to love were wiseass goofs and collaging phraseologists, adorers of everyday details, never taking themselves too seriously.
I basically haven’t read Thomas since I was eighteen. But now when I randomly open his Collected Poems and find:
To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,
Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,
Time at the city spectacles, and half
The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,
In trust and tale I have divided sense,
Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double
Of head and tail made witnesses to this
Murder of Eden and green genesis.
. . . I have to say it gives me a kick and I can detect in myself that seventeen-year-old’s reaction to it of wanting to see what I could do in little word compartments on the page like that. (“Now that my symbols have outelbowed space”—Oh yeah! Really.) I can’t remember what led me to Thomas, but I was always reading and had always gotten a lot of mileage out of words, incoming and outgoing, and he was a notorious icon of the kind of life I imagined for myself: a guy who spun himself out of his head into women’s beds and headlines and a general orgiastic existence, living by his wits, without going to school and working a job, and left a trail of songs of it, pretty songs of thanks and praise and tears and nonsense, souvenirs of his discoveries and losses, for everyone to enjoy and ponder and live with him. When I got tired of that poetry it was because it came to seem like overblown mystification and drama, like fog machines at a rock concert, taking what was probably only a vague little idea or quasi-insight per poem and decorating and declaiming it, Robert Plant style, not with the mystery of being too profound for clear words, but rather the vagueness and insubstantiality of the original idea being further distanced and obscured by preacherly howling and growling.
But when I look at it now I get off on it, and can actually read it as direct in its own way, and get that that’s actually a lot of the pleasure of it. If you read that stanza as if it were straight speech, it’s a weird funhouse that keeps surprising you with the turns it takes and the scenes that pass and the jumps it makes between levels. It’s crude too, jamming together unmatching phrases, and in that way it’s lovably unpretentious. It could almost be a cutup. And, after all, my main man New York poet Ted Berrigan himself in The Sonnets repeatedly used an allusion to Thomas: “Shall it be male or female in the tub?” (The Thomas poem “If I Were Tickled by the Rub of Love” twice asks, “Shall it be male or female?” and then goes “rub” repeatedly.) In fact, the style of Berrigan’s Sonnets is not that far from Thomas. Take just the same number of lines as in the above stanza from the start of the first poem in The Sonnets (“I”):
His piercing pince-nez. Some dim frieze
Hands point to a dim frieze, in the dark night.
In the book of his music the corners have straightened:
Which owe their presence to our sleeping hands.
The ox-blood from the hands which play
For fire for warmth for hands for growth
Is there room in the room that you room in?
Upon his structured tomb:
I’d fallen for Thomas’s poetry and I got his book of letters, too, and a biography. He looked like a dignified piglet with a cigarette butt stuck in his lips, and his messy curls, and a sloppy bow tie. You could see how it took a lot of attitude to make his bulbous visage as sexy as he managed to do, and it also took a lot of liquor and a good sense of humor, along with his way with words.
I went to the library too, to see who the other modern poets were. I disliked the educated, fastidious, grim ones like, say, Robert Lowell. I discovered William Carlos Williams, and that decided me that poetry was the ticket. He’d had book after handsome book published by New Directions, and was treated like a VIP, and I knew I could write better than him. I thought if he could make it with a few white chickens, a wet red wheelbarrow, and some cold plums in the icebox, I could sure damn well make it too. Dylan Thomas was my model, but it was Williams who actually sold me on my vocation. Funny, even though I never did develop much interest in Williams, those objects of his are the highlights of this paragraph, no question. Objectivism they called it.
CHAPTER SIX
A day after Christmas in 1966 I left home permanently on a bus to New York.
Four or five Sanford boys were in the city for the holidays. I shared a hotel room off Washington Square Park with a couple of them and we bought some bad street grass and did some drinking, and then, when they returned to school, I was alone again and almost broke.
I checked the classifieds for a job and the next day I was working as a stock boy at Macy’s. A young Puerto Rican coworker with a big Afro agreed to take me as a roommate. I moved out of my cheap hotel and into his tiny furnished single room at 1 Irving Place, on the corner of Fourteenth Street. There was a bed and closet, a little table, and a sink. The bathroom was in the hall. The rent was about $20 a week, which we split.
We lived above a Horn and Hardart automat—a cafeteria where you could also buy pie slices and macaroni and deep-fried fish fillets from little windows in the wall, like fancy coin-operated post office boxes that contained food. The busboy service was minimal, so we would fill up by taking a table that had just been vacated and eating whatever was left on it.
My roommate called himself a classical composer and he had some creased blank music sheets that he would sometimes sit and stare at, every once in a while penciling some notes on the staffs. He drank a lot. We had to share the bed and he would come back drunk in the middle of the night and get in bed and throw up. It was a little operetta of its own.
After a few months I’d saved up enough to get myself an apartment. From then on I quit jobs and changed apartments continuously. Both were so plentiful there was no reason to keep a job if I’d saved enough to go for two weeks without working, and there was no reason to pay rent if my income got too low, since it took a couple of months of nonpayment before the landlord could legally evict me. All of my apartments were small and most of them were dark and some were mildly dangerous. I can remember seven of them from 1967 through 1975, and I remember working that first year as: the Macy’s stock boy, a door-to-door magazine subscription salesman, a stock clerk in a bookstore, and a book fetcher and shelver at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street, and I’m sure there were more. Later I’d drive taxis, get a lot of unskilled office work on assignments from temp agencies, sort mail in the post office, unload fruit and vegetable crates in shape-up crews down at the docks all night, and carry fifty-pound cement bags up to tenement roofs as a construction worker.
In the course of that construction job Allen Ginsberg once liked my looks on the street and invited me over. It made me think of Walt Whitman admiring the sweat-sheened torsos of laborers. I declined without hesitation, automatically, never having felt much rapport with Ginsberg from his writings, and because it wasn’t within my range to give encouragement to a gay guy trying to pick me up, though it didn’t bother me.
One job I never considered was table waiting. I couldn’t have taken smiling at customers and being polite for tips all day.
If you could endure working somewhere for the statutory five months minimum, you’d try to handle it so that you were listed as having been let go for reasons beyond anyone’s control, rather than fired for cause, because then you could collect unemployment checks.
There were ways of compensating for boring jobs: petty thievery of course, but my big illumination was the strategy of being so efficient and hardworking for the first three weeks that I’d look indispensable and could then slack for months before the first impression wore off. If I were lucky, I’d even have held on to enough respect that I could explain how personal problems had been undercutting my performance and the boss would lay me off and I could still cop the unemployment checks.
I’d been making an ignorant teenager’s stabs at writing, without any real foundation of values except the most base, namely to express my poor, lonely, sentimental, grandiose, poetic self. I did have confidence in my insights into situations and people, and also in my basic aesthetic discrimination. But for the longest time (which at that age was three or four years) I was only a writer because I conceived of myself as one. I didn’t write very much and what I wrote was not any good and it was mostly Dylan Thomas derived (one of my earliest New York poems began “Rain me green on stones unseething”). They were a lot about a desire t
o dissolve and about sex (coyly or under cover of symbols and similes) and about a fear of some horrible flaw in myself. As a poet or writer, I would become an example of how if you wear a mask long enough it becomes your face, or, to put it more kindly, how vocations often begin as poses.
I enrolled in a night poetry workshop at the New School in hopes of maybe meeting people who were interested in some of the same things as me. I had bad luck with that class, though I did meet a sad, hysterical girl with red capillaries on her nose and cheekbones, and large breasts that looked like twin Eeyores, who would let me have sex with her.
The guy who taught the class was a former poet named José Garcia Villa. “Former” because part of his self-dramatization was that in the late fifties he’d stopped writing in order “not to repeat” himself. He was Filipino, born in Manila in 1908, though he’d been in the U.S., mostly New York City, since he was twenty-one. He’d made a little literary splash in the forties and early fifties.
He was given to a poetic vocabulary not too far from Thomas’s, maybe a tad more Blakean or Rilkean, if more limited, favoring words like “naked” and “bright” and “rose” and “lion”—but most especially and revealingly “I” and “God” (in both of whose ways he’d often instruct his readers)—in clean, aphoristic rows.
