by Richard Hell
I arrived at the same time as Andy Brown, who’d been chosen from among applicants by the aged Miss Steloff to buy the store from her. One of his first projects was an inventory, and I got assigned to help catalog the hundreds and hundreds of old literary magazines, many in complete runs, that filled a storage room on the second floor. I spent day after day alone up there, crouched at the bottom of the shelves, turning over in my hands such signifying artifacts as T. S. Eliot’s august Criterion (“it must be said”); Harriet Monroe’s Poetry when it was publishing Pound’s circle in the teens and twenties (Pegasus Chicago); Eugene and Maria Jolas’s Paris journal Transition, where a lot of early modernists and surrealists appeared (champagne, frottage); Princess Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure (Renaissance print shop), a gorgeous high-toned bohemian thing from Rome; Wyndham Lewis’s British magazine Blast (Lewis with his hair on fire); Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review (grid of tweedy breasts); Charles Henri Ford’s View, where all the 1940s temporarily New York European Dadaists/surrealists like Breton and Man Ray and Max Ernst published (avid narcissism of bohemian style); Ashbery’s and Koch’s and Schuyler’s and Mathews’s Locus Solus (swoon of witty word chess); Diane Di Prima’s and LeRoi Jones’s The Floating Bear (a bear who can’t drown because he’s a doodle) . . . The array seemed to embody the separate camps of all the assertive sensibilities of the century in bound-paper containers of their representation. (My very favorite literary magazine, though I didn’t discover it till a few years later—the greatest literary magazine of the twentieth century—was a clumsy, cheap, legal-sized, stapled mimeo, published on the Lower East Side, 1963–1966, called simply C, edited by Ted Berrigan. You could extrapolate everything worthwhile in the universe from its thirteen issues, and you’d have a great time, giggling.)
At the Gotham I met a guy who recommended that my Genesis : Grasp coeditor and I move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it’d be cheaper to live and get printing done, as well as being pretty and quiet. We were curious about the desert, as well as kind of nervous about how we were going to be able to afford to publish the magazine in New York, so we decided to try it, and signed up for a driveaway car, which I totaled in Illinois, drunk. (I called its owner in Texas to inform him. He didn’t yell at me but just chillingly whispered, “Oh no.”) We took a bus the rest of the way.
Living in Santa Fe was like a prolonged case of that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and don’t really want to get out of bed yet and face the day, but then can only doze a little—which is actually more exhausting than being awake is—unable to fall fully back asleep, and you stretch out the postponement of getting out of bed way too long, into brainlessness like the inside of your head has turned to chalk.
The town was a backwater, and worse was the mediocre-artist demographic, with its pretense that it had rejected corrupt worldly striving for natural Santa Fe. There was no one to talk to. We got a spacious but unheated flattop adobe house, set on a slope on the edge of town, for $50 a month. A violent alcoholic Chicano Vietnam vet lived in a house down the hill, and he’d come up to drink and rant every day or two. I liked him but in small doses. The center of town was a long, dull walk away for groceries.
Our finest moment there was getting a poem from Allen Ginsberg for the magazine, which he’d kindly sent on receipt of our pathetic solicitation, and then rejecting it. It didn’t meet our standards of craftsmanship. He wrote a cold angry couple of sentences back. We literally did not know what we were doing.
I did find a pretty girlfriend, kind of the low-energy teenage Marlon Brando girl of Santa Fe. She was inarticulate but broody and rebellious and dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans. Her parents worked at the tiny local college, St. John’s. As usual, though, sex was tense and claustrophobic, like it was a room that had those infrared alarm beams crisscrossing it, like in jewel-heist movies. Everything seemed to set off uncertainty and remorse. And the social part before and after was no more relaxed than that either. (This is all in hindsight. Like the loneliness, the difficult sex seemed normal at the time. God knows I craved it.)
We’d been in Santa Fe for two months or so when Giannini’s draft board contacted him and he had to return to New Jersey. That was enough to decide us the experiment was over. He flew home, and soon after I hitchhiked back to New York. In those days hitchhiking was still common. It was illegal on the big interstates but there were plenty of other well-traveled roads to thumb, and it was easy enough to station yourself at the entrance ramps to the interstates, too. In the Midwest somewhere, on my way back to New York, a farmer brought me home to his family’s big noisy dinner table piled with steaming fresh vegetables and butter and bread and iced tea and ham and fried chicken, like out of a cowboy movie, and I slept for a night on their living room couch.
A couple of days later I got drenched in a sustained rainstorm at dusk on a shelterless two-lane where no car stopped.
I got back to New York City fine, though, and that was the only time I’ve ever tried to live anywhere else.
CHAPTER NINE
In 1968 I held a series of jobs, most rewardingly at the Strand Book Store among a crew of other artistically inclined kids. I worked in the basement packing books for shipping. But the year slipped past in a static-y, routine montage of menial employment, awkward romantic relationships, forced tortured writing, and unskilled magazine editing.
With girlfriend Marianne, 1968.
One notable event was that I received my orders to appear in the fall before the Selective service. I was eighteen and eligible for the draft. The Vietnam War was raging.
There were lots of stories about how a guy could get away with presenting himself as homosexual or crazy or drug addicted to get out of the draft. I couldn’t see doing that. It would grate too much on my self-respect to let the government turn me into an elaborate liar. It wasn’t really a principle, just a natural reaction. I realize that the attitude was a luxury. My ambivalence about faking would probably keep me from being able to pull it off anyway. I wasn’t going to claim to be a conscientious objector either. I could imagine wars I’d fight, and I didn’t want to go into alternative service.
I finally decided to go to the induction center and do whatever came naturally, to just trust my honest responses. The army could not really want someone like me.
The day came and I stood in line with the other candidates in an ugly institutional examination room. The physical was routine and inoffensive, and then we were led to a classroom where we were given papers with multiple-choice questions on them. My indignation started to build. The questions were stupid and boring and obnoxious, and I didn’t feel like submitting. I stood up and left the room. There must have been an official present, but I don’t remember. It wasn’t a situation where they’d physically prevent someone from leaving.
The halls of the building were dead quiet; everyone was behind closed doors. I wandered around uncertainly for a minute or two before an officer walked by and asked what I was doing in the hallway. I told him I’d been taking the written test but had gotten fed up with it. He asked me if I wanted to see a psychiatrist and I said OK. He took me to an office.
In the office was a shrink straight from Central Casting. He not only had a goatee but he had a Viennese accent. He asked me vut zeh pkroblem was and I told him I resented the written test, that the questions were insulting and that’s why I’d stopped answering them. I told him I didn’t think there’d be any point in putting me in the army. I was a high school dropout who couldn’t hold a job and a lot of the reason was that I was a loner who’d never been part of any organization and I couldn’t stand authority. I knew what would happen if I was drafted into the army—I’d end up in the brig. What would be the point of that? I meant what I said, and I guess I was convincing because I was given a psychological deferral.
Tom and I wrote each other letters sporadically. He had ended up graduating from public high school in Wilmington and then enrolled in a university in the Carolinas somewhere, but he
quickly dropped out. By the end of the year he moved up to the East Village.
Right away we began spending most of our spare time together. Our mentalities got intermixed. When we didn’t have girlfriends, we’d be together for days on end except when we were at work. We shared apartments for short periods, but even when we had our own places, half the time one of us would find himself at the other’s so late at night that the visitor would just crash on the floor, and we’d keep talking across the rooms in a lazy artillery of cartoon characters, César Vallejo, and guck-sicles that would continue as we read our books, maybe him up in his loft bed, me with a blanket and pillow on the floor in the next room, for another hour before we passed out. People thought we were brothers. We were the same height and had the same skinny, wide-shouldered builds. Our speech tones and patterns even became similar—people mistook us for each other on the phone.
Those years—1969 to 1974, from when Tom got to New York until we began playing at CBGB with our band Television—seem to have lasted such a long time, to have contained more than could be possible, because everything was new and made such strong impressions on us and we were changing so quickly. But during the time itself, those four or five years felt like forever for the opposite reason: that there was nothing to do. But our ennui actually contributed to our sense of freedom—we were so bored and isolated we might try anything.
For a few months in the spring of 1969, we shared an apartment on Eleventh Street just west of Second Avenue. It was a typical little three-room shotgun flat five or six floors up in a tenement. The refrigerator had been leaking on the kitchen floor and the landlord had ignored our complaints. One boring afternoon we squeezed it through the window to the airshaft. There’s not a much better-feeling suspense than that endless second or two during which a heavy machine is falling from a great height.
Now and then, when we were walking down a street together, we’d hunch forward and begin to buzz with our mouths and flap our elbows, and do figure eights along the curb and gutter for a block or two, fertilizing the parking meters.
Every few weeks the two of us would have enough money between us to go have a drink at a bar. We shared pretty much everything we had, except girlfriends. Since neither of us had anything, it evened out. We’d spring for expensive bar booze, rather than an occasional quart of beer at home, to check out artists’ bars, where we thought we might find good-looking girls who had the right values. Max’s Kansas City was the paradigm. Other bars would ascend to be briefly as hip as Max’s and then sink again. A new artists’ bar that year was St. Adrian’s, at the Broadway Central Hotel on Broadway at Third Street. The hotel was a huge old flophouse that extended all the way back to the next street over, Mercer. (Three years later it would host, in its backside there, the Mercer Arts Center, where the New York Dolls were the house band at the Oscar Wilde Room.) St. Adrian’s occupied the hotel’s entire ground floor, with a very long bar. Sleek, long-legged girls who had clean hair and fresh clothes crowded the space. Some people had paint spatters on their pants, some wore sunglasses.
One night at St. Adrian’s we hit pay dirt. Two girls talked to us and bought us drinks and invited us to their table. They were older than we were and less inhibited than us and obviously had more money. Everybody got drunk. Eventually one of them, Patty, came back to our apartment with Tom and me. Tom and I shared a big double mattress on the floor. There wasn’t any other furniture in the apartment except some milk-crate shelving and some cushions and a couple of kitchen chairs at a kitchen table. The three of us, too drunk to do anything else, lay down in bed. It was dark. I didn’t know what Tom was thinking, but I was not going to let this chance to have sex with Patty go by. I took the initiative and she and I started kissing. Tom went up on the roof to sleep. She gave me her phone number when she left the next morning. I called a week or two later, and we ended up in a romance that interrupted for almost two years the life I’d been leading with Tom.
It turned out that she was the wife of Claes Oldenburg, the pop artist famous for his sculptures, soft and otherwise, giant and otherwise, of food and appliances and generic household doodads. When I met her, Patty and Claes were getting divorced after nine years together, during which she had been his muse and expeditor. She was seamstress of his sculptures and frequent star of his Happenings. He had recently moved out of their fifth-floor loft, just east of First Avenue on Fourteenth Street.
The loft was spectacular, stretching an entire block in length, from Fourteenth Street back to another entrance on Thirteenth Street, and the whole width of an old factory building, about as wide as a tenement building. I’d never seen anything like it. The living space, half a block deep (about forty-five yards) on the Fourteenth Street end, was separated into four white-painted rooms lit by big windows (the building was taller than adjacent buildings, so the loft had windows going along the sides of it, as well as onto Fourteenth Street and Thirteenth Street). The industrial entrance door from the fifth-floor landing led into the dining room, which was empty except for a rope hammock and a little glass cabinet of some drippily painted life-size plaster cakes and hamburgers of Claes’s. The main room, beyond the dining room, fronted onto Fourteenth Street and was more than twice the size of the dining room. A double bed was parked along the wall, but that area was also the living room, with a couch and some chairs and a glass coffee table. Against the wall past the bed were bookshelves of art books and New York poetry. Down in the far reaches towards Fourteenth Street was a life-sized biplane framework, a giant hardwood replica of the balsa skeleton of a model plane, hung with Christmas tree lights.
The kitchen, with its long shiny wooden table, was on the other side of the dining room. The portable record player was usually in the kitchen too, because that’s where we sat around. There was always a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red, my arbitrary drink of choice, in reach there, provided by Patty. Past the kitchen was a smaller room with another bed. That second-bedroom section of the loft was divided lengthwise to include, alongside the bedroom, a very large bathroom that had a gigantic tub in the middle of it.
There was recent New York art on all the walls—Andy Warhol silkscreen paintings, plenty of Claes, Lucas Samaras, Öyvind Fahlström, Jim Dine.
This was half the loft, the Fourteenth Street side. The Thirteenth Street end had been Claes’s studio. It was cavernous, without dividing walls and unrenovated. The bare brick perimeter was dark and dusty, the ceilings splintery rafters and planks, and the floors were the worn unfinished wood of an old-fashioned city factory. Windows lined the long brick side walls. A lot of Claes’s collection of little dime-store knickknacks and generic clothing and pieces of hardware and magazine ads and small shiny toys, etc., that would become his hallucinatorily magical Mouse Museum was scattered around on shelves and tabletops, and there were unfinished sculptures and ragged pieces of fragile early works of sloppily painted papier-mâché supermarket-ware logos, or dust-thick big canvas sculptures of diner food here and there, down the room. It was fantastic.
I didn’t take all this in immediately. It took weeks to learn about what was what in the apartment, who was who around Patty and what they’d done, what her life had been in the previous few years. At the beginning, she was just a funny rich chick who liked my company and took good care of me and loved having sex. We were always laughing. And though, yes, she had all the money she needed, she was no kind of snob. She was really a working-class Polish kid from Milwaukee, with no sense of economic entitlement. She was like the wiseass, hardass chicks I went to junior high school with in Lexington, only she was an artist and she’d been in the middle of things in American art for the past few years. She hadn’t actually been making art herself for quite a while, but she’d come to New York to do that at the end of the fifties, when she was just out of art school, and she was now as sophisticated about art and the “art scene” as anybody else in that world. She knew that half the people in it were crooks and that, when not creepy, the art world was largely a circus and a gam
e, but that a lot of the players in it were amusing, interesting people, and she respected the making of real art probably more than any other human undertaking. She took it all lightly—and pleasure and wit were what mattered—but she was soulful too.
At the beginning, she was just a funny rich chick who liked my company and took good care of me and loved having sex.
A tense night towards the end of our relationship was partly salvaged when she remarked wistfully, “Absolutes make the heart go flounder.” How could you not love someone who could say something like that? Another thing she said once was, “A fool and her money are soon poeted.” Also, “Unhappiness is just another form of happiness.”
She was a firecracker, small and bow-legged and quick, with a pretty little hard ass. She had stringy, greasy peroxide-blond hair and a wide flat Slavic face that was also a bit hard. She strutted like a sexy girl-rooster, often in a teeny brown leather miniskirt or a short, silky, leopard-print wrap dress.
