by Richard Hell
Anyway, he gave his classes in order to preside over a circle as much as anything else. Along with the proper class at the school on West Twelfth Street every week, there would be a social gathering at his apartment on Saturdays, and another one at a Smith’s bar at Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street on Tuesdays. Everybody vied to be as debonairly supercilious, sexually insinuating, and sarcastic about poets of inferior sensibility as he was. I was the youngest student. Villa pronounced to all that I was “the most poetical looking” and one of the “sickest, which is a prerequisite for writing decent poems.”
Whatever the direction I was going, I wanted to keep moving, and so, before 1967 was out, I’d started a poetry magazine with another student from the group named David Giannini. Giannini was about my age, had recently arrived in the city from New Jersey, and was poetry obsessed. He looked more Scandinavian than Italian—tall and muscular with thin blond hair, he wore wire-rimmed glasses, denim work shirts, corduroy jeans, and Hush Puppies. He worked out to stay buff and had a couple of slightly dumpy but definitely sexy longtime girlfriends we saw a lot of, who’d doted since high school on his poeticalness and light sex japes. He liked to speak aphoristically too, like Villa, often making twinkling pronouncements, like “Picasso’s nudes have blue periods,” that were unequivocally insupportable.
True to our lyrical bent, we named the magazine Genesis : Grasp. The six issues we published across four years (1968–71) did present a beginning so early it’s retardedly fetal. The first three issues were self-important, unfocused, and amateur, like a high school literary magazine. To give the magazine its due, it improved a lot by the final number, a double issue (#5/6). By then I’d moved a long way from my coeditor in tastes and attitude, and I edited the last three numbers (4 and 5/6) pretty much on my own. At that point I was printing them on a little $300 used tabletop offset printing press in my apartment, and typesetting the magazine on a rented IBM VariTyper.
I did have a little further public existence as a poet in those years. Once we started the magazine and I had written a file of poems, I sent a few to James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions Books, for him to consider for that year’s New Directions Annual. To my mind, Laughlin’s publishing company was the most prestigious in America. Not only was he Dylan Thomas’s American publisher, but he also published Céline, Nabokov, Wilfred Owen, and Rimbaud (not to mention Henry Miller and William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound), and many other of strictly the most literarily ambitious and adventurous international writers. The Annual was his hardcover anthology of new writing and had been coming out since the midthirties. In the 1970 edition he published eight poems of mine that I’d written in the previous couple of years, when I was eighteen and nineteen. They were awful—stilted and bombastic and sentimental. He published four more the following year and a couple of those were marginally better. But the better I got the less he seemed to like what I did. Still, I thought of New Directions as my publisher. Laughlin encouraged me to think he would eventually do a book of mine, but by the time I had put together one I liked, at age twenty-one or so, entitled Baby Hermaphrodite Rabbits, he didn’t believe it would do. A few years later, once I’d been playing rock and roll for a while, I contacted him again, in hopes that he might be interested in commercial publication of a book for which I was responsible, with Tom, and in which I had complete confidence—Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern (about which, more later)—but he was scornful of it, and that was the end of our relationship.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A few days ago I went out for a walk by myself. My wife had been home sick for a while and we needed a break from each other. Two blocks from my apartment, along Eleventh Street between First and Second Avenues, I saw a pair of sneakers in the window of Tokyo Joe, a tiny Japanese-run consignment clothing store specializing in haute designers. I needed new sneakers and these looked great and never worn. They were low cut and form fitting in a complex web pattern of black and tomato-red leather sewn onto cream-colored suede, and made in Italy. They fit me perfectly and they only cost fifty-eight dollars, when they’d cost five times that new. I paid for them and said I’d pick them up in two or three hours, on my way back home.
It was a sunny, warm late afternoon in April. Further down the block, at the corner juice bar on Second Avenue, I got myself a take-out Full Meal Power blend of bananas, strawberries and apple juice with some kind of nutrition powder. It tasted like cold God.
I thought I’d stroll towards the West Village. A lot of people were out enjoying the weather. In Washington Square Park, the huge, rough, but delicately leaf-budding trees were pretty in a transvestite kind of way, but the park was mostly concrete and hard-packed dirt, and the large fountain pool in its central plaza was dry. The fountain had been appropriated, as it often is these years, by some dreary, fake-funny busker act whom a large touristy crowd on the fountain’s perimeter was encouraging with self-congratulatory laughter and applause.
When I first left home and came to the city at seventeen, the park was glamorous for being where drugs were available to people who had no references. Vagrant kids with acoustic guitars hung out and hoped for action. It’s the same now, only the heads are skate kids or stunt dancers instead of folksingers. Harmony Korine and his prep-school skate punks, including Chloë Sevigny, got their start in movies after being spotted there in the nineties.
I worked my way towards the street where my grandmother used to live. She died decades ago, but when I was a child, and then for my earliest years in New York, she lived at 72 Barrow Street. For me, the West Village—formerly plain Greenwich Village—will always be primarily the site of her apartment, and it’s still my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan. Some of it is a tourist trap, but even the tourist attractions are relatively benign—“bohemian” cafés, chess clubs, music and guitar stores, sex-toy emporia, and leather-and-denim boutiques, rather than, say, the tacky Disney theater, franchise fast food, and rip-off “Must move! Going out of business!” electronics hawkers of the Times Square tourist trap uptown.
The core of the West Village is still a quiet tangle of narrow old tree-lined streets, some still cobblestoned. The tenements and brownstone apartment buildings, with their cast-iron stoop railings, and the small town houses, a few even made of wood, are some of the oldest in the city, and most are only three or four floors high, which makes the sky seem big. From the street, you can see through these homes’ hefty double-hung windows how their rooms have high ceilings and wooden moldings and lots of bookshelves. On each block, a few of the ground floors host faded storefronts, like a little butcher shop or a laundromat, or bookstore, or pastry shop, or a tiny theater company or cabaret, or an eccentric restaurant. You know that many strangers have fallen in love with each other in those laundromats, especially when it was raining, whether they ever spoke or not.
My grandmother lived in one of four six-story buildings symmetrically enclosing a garden courtyard, on the northeast corner of Barrow and Hudson. The rough brick of the buildings is red-brown veined with sooty black, more like that of dismal row housing in industrial England than typical American brick, but it signified comfort to me.
Her apartment was tiny, smaller than the tenement apartment in which I’ve lived since 1975, which was already a few years after she’d died. She had a minuscule kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all small. The rooms were well lit by old casement windows with tarry putty squashed around their edges, and the floors were wood parquet, and there were prints on the walls and books on the shelves, plus the black and white Million Dollar Movie on TV. A dumbwaiter in the kitchen was used to lower trash to the basement on a certain schedule.
The few times we visited the apartment when I was a little kid, I couldn’t sleep because I wasn’t used to traffic noise, even from five stories above. I would lie in bed frustratedly sleepy, but also happy to be part of the huge activity of the city, the machinery of the night, a different night from Kentucky.
When I was a young teenager, th
e clothes in the shops on West Fourth Street were all eggplant and cream and tan colored, like “October in the railroad earth”—horizontal-striped T-shirts and thick dark-leather belts with big brass buckles, corduroy jeans, and boots, and work shirts, and suede and leather sports coats or work jackets. It’s what the beatniks and folkies wore. On one visit I bought a Levi’s suede cowboy jacket, same as their denim version, but suede. Even as a teenager, I still aspired a little to the cowboy.
Her apartment was like Superman’s telephone booth to me; when I entered it I became another person, or the person I was to myself, rather than the person I was in everyday society. I became not only a citizen of Gotham but powerful and interesting, because she treated me like that.
During the first few months I lived in New York in 1967, she had me over to her apartment for dinner every week or two. After those first months I saw her less, and the last few times I saw her, a couple of years after I’d arrived, she was losing the ability to care for herself. I didn’t have the maturity to know how to respond to that. I was spooked and bewildered. Her memory got bad, and the apartment became overrun by cockroaches, and she would fart continuously as she walked around, confused but chiding herself. Soon Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Dick took her in upstate, and a year or two later, when it got to where she needed constant attention, they put her in a nursing home.
Forty years later, I found myself gravitating towards her building as I walked from Washington Square a few blocks deeper west into the Village. Her street had hardly changed at all. It was quiet. The sidewalk entrance to her compound was set off by a high cast-iron archway under which a narrow shale path led between two of the buildings into her courtyard. The courtyard was eerily intimate, almost miniature—maybe fifty paces wide and another fifteen across. It was symmetrically divided into seven flower beds, their shapes formed by the crisscrossing stone walks linking the buildings’ four doorways in the corners of the rectangular court. In the middle of the round center flower bed stood a wide, pitted stone urn on a pedestal. Beyond it, at the far edge of the enclosure, directly across from the path to the street, were two low spreading cherry trees. The ground ivy of each flower bed surrounded a broad stand of tulips blooming in four or five different monochromes. They were everywhere I looked. The flowers had that unconscious bounty that makes you understand how women get compared to flowers. Gratitude welled in me for the pure generosity of the flowers, not unlike the way I’ve been known to feel about a passing, unknown woman’s breasts inside her sweater. I gazed at the cherry trees; they were in bloom, too. Their contorted, furrowed black branches were speckled and hidden by overlapping scribbles and billows of frothing pink that also made me want to thank someone. I tipped my head back. Way, way up high a balloon blew across the sky. Another one and then another one appeared, six or seven more in brilliant colors that rhymed with the tulips. I was conscious of my grandmother and her selfless love. I remembered how it was possible for such a thing to exist, and I felt grateful again, not just to have been the object of it, but to recall the way certain people are that pure, and then I felt my own pettiness fall away for a moment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The first Central Park Human Be-In took place at the end of March 1967. “Be-In” makes me think “donut,” internal donut. The DNA of humankind as stale crullers. I went up to the Sheep Meadow to take a look. People were standing around eyeing each other and some of them were wearing little bells on their clothes. There was face paint and flowers and pot smoking. Some kids were waving their arms and singing. The Sheep Meadow is big, and there were thousands and thousands there. Drugs were a theme, and people chanted about love. Most of them weren’t really dressed right—just a hasty bead necklace or a hair daisy—but then neither was the Velvet Underground usually.
Like George Bush’s flag waving after the World Trade Center attacks, the Be-In was more repellent for its assumption of an axiomatic underlying basis of unity than for the dubious underlying idea itself. For Bush’s Americans that dubious idea was the virtue of self-righteous patriotism, and for the hippies it was the practicability of universal kindness and generosity. The people joined together by those unexamined assumptions seemed idiotic. On the other hand, my inability to fit in was involuntary too.
I was confused and disconcerted. Crowds bothered me, for one, and I knew I was badly flawed and I didn’t see any way out of it. There was an exhilaration in the strength of the numbers though, and it did seem to promise that there would be serious consequences before the generation got old. It was spring in the ward.
I do remember once seeing a guy who was young and who had long blond hair and a handlebar mustache and a square jaw, back then. He was handsome and seemed self-confident and rich, looking around upstairs in the gallery of Gotham Book Mart with his friend. Maybe it was Dennis Hopper. He was probably someone like Dennis Hopper. Perhaps he helped organize the Woodstock festival. He was wearing a western suede jacket with very long fringe, including a row down the back of each sleeve, so his leather trailed psychedelically and swung, rippling, with casual cowboy majesty as he gestured. I envied him that jacket. I wished there was a world in which I could wear it. I’d dress Elizabethan style, myself, if I could get away with it.
At the beginning of June, two months after the Be-In, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released. I had to pretend to like it because it was played for me by this girl I’d met in the office where a temp agency had sent me that week. She had pot too. I wanted to fuck her so much. My facial expressions, speech, and gestures were the unprepossessing facade on a huge warehouse of hope to fuck. She was short and perky, with that little dash of a nose-tip and the disproportionately large nostrils that say “nose job.” She had pretty skin—poreless, white, and smooth. I was a beardless seventeen-year-old stick figure, all wrists and ankles, with rumpled hair starting to cover my ears, archaic T. S. Elliot round tortoiseshell glasses, work shirt, jeans, and little status beyond dispossessed youth. I did look like a poet. I had deep-set eyes and thick lips and I smoked Lucky Strikes. Nan was probably five years older than me.
She lived in a renovated apartment on Second Avenue near Fifth Street, a single room filled with candles and batik pillows. I was depending on the implications of her willingness to smoke grass alone with me. The Beatles record had come out the day before. She played it on a portable stereo. I grew up on the Beatles. They were exciting when I was in the eighth grade. It was dewy, highly delineated, cute rock and roll. The new record was embarrassing. The band was presenting itself in a winking music-hall getup, with a lot of dramatic orchestration, to explain social problems to us. The public-event nature of the album’s release, following from the Beatles’ incredible popularity, was like the Academy Awards on TV, glitzy but dull, and left me feeling not so much let down as left out, elsewhere, and a little tacky by association.
I acted impressed for Nan’s sake, as you would for a stranger telling you a personal anecdote, especially if she was wearing a very short skirt. I’m not saying I wasn’t boring too. I was. Did that mean I’d have to do without sexual intercourse? No!
We rolled a joint, lit some candles, and turned off the lamps. I succeeded with Nan but it was hard work, and, as usual, still hard work once I’d gotten my dick inside her. As the sex act proceeded, she behaved like she was resisting it. She didn’t fight, just passively refused to participate. But I was no epicurean voluptuary myself. I probably wasn’t even putting my mouth between a girl’s legs yet, at least not with any skill (though the fact is a girl like Nan, back then, would probably have been so embarrassed by it that it would have turned her off and she’d have discouraged me).
In those days girls didn’t groom their pubic hair. That was sexy—it was an animalistic sign of individuality, despite a girl’s otherwise carefully managed appearance. Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet. It was slick, like a squeaky rubber duck. Of course I ejaculated within seconds of squeezing my hard-on into it. Then it was back to having to try to think of
something to talk about and trying to seem relaxed, while the brain wheels spun like a car’s in the mud.
By late 1967 I had an apartment on Sixth Street east of Second Avenue. It was one dark room and I was lonely there a lot. The loneliness was unpleasant but I came to think it was inevitable, not only because it never went away, but because there was a whole literature of alienation to go with it. There’s a whole literature for every stage of maturity, but especially the earlier ones.
I worked at Gotham Book Mart in midtown for a while at this time. I learned a lot there. It was the most famous and the best literary bookstore in New York, probably in the whole world, in terms of inventory, and perhaps second only to Paris’s Shakespeare & Company for literary associations. It had a huge out-of-print stock. Every year, for decades, the management had been saving and storing each year’s unsold obscure and ambitious new poetry and fiction, as well as film literature, and all other high culture in printed form, much of it from esoteric small presses. The whole three-story building on Forty-Seventh Street was store property. Among the district’s diamond merchants’ shingles poked out the bookstore’s little painted cast-iron sign of three fishermen in a rowboat, their pole lines down in the ripples, a catch bending each one’s rod, above the caption “wise men fish here.” Miss Steloff, the owner, who’d started the shop in 1920, was still there nearly every day.
The store had low ceilings and was a jumble. The floor-to-ceiling shelves that lined the walls, and the waist-high aisles of shelves and display tables in the rooms, were all home-carpentered in worn wood that was painted deep blue. Books and papers and pamphlets were stacked and stuffed on every surface. The wall shelves were “double packed”—meaning there was a row of books behind the visible ones. Mr. Lyman, the harried store manager, who always wore a white dress shirt, tie, and pressed slacks, was a thin, stiffly upright, cartoonishly bland-featured man who wore black-rimmed glasses on a tense face that reddened under the nonstop pressure. He was like a character from a Victorian novel—it seemed as if the store was his whole world. Or like he was a military lifer, getting all his pride and dignity from his commitment to the service, like a mildly femme and nervous James Stewart in the Victor McLaglen role in a John Ford cavalry movie. It was a serious enterprise up there, and they all regarded themselves as devoted servants of the writers and their literate public.
