Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  It was the great celebration of life itself. I loved all the hair, all the legs and tits and everything flowing, singing. It was like the first day of creation, everything just made with the divine stamp on it. Life as expansion instead of contraction. Life as affirmation instead of fear, hiding in the corner or under the stairs.

  All the poets I’d heard about were there, tons of poets I’d never heard about.

  It was a Who’s Who of the poetry world.

  John Oliver Simon and his wife. Richard Morris. Richard Krech. Norm Moser. Todd Lawson. Sharon Asselin. Harry Smith and his gang from New York. Duane Locke from Tampa.

  There was a big poetry reading and I was asked to read.

  The first time I’d ever read in public. But little Hughie Fox, singer and dancer, Mrs. Metzger’s prize little Sarastro was up to anything artistic.

  So I got up and started reading and the audience picked up the rhythms and started clapping:

  The wing-beat of peace-shared filled our

  mimeos and we dragged on the joints of

  variant para-psychology

  in the knowledge that our cellular

  non-establishment wold reproduce itself instead

  of rusting in the graveyards of weapons

  obsolescence.

  I am a witness,

  I was there.

  From my “Stars and Stripes Forever Mind-Blast Sutra,” inspired by the Hippy-Yippy world around me, punctuated by my experiences in the Andes, all I’d read about psychedelic plants that the Andean and Amazonian Indians ate to turn themselves into jaguar shamans, leaving behind their everydayness and turning into magic seers and prophets.

  Of course they went crazy with the poetry and afterwards everyone came up to me and embraced me.

  After the reading Fulton came up to me.

  “Listen, Fox, remember that panel you were on on little mags? OK, we’ve been talking it over, and some of the gang thinks we ought to form a small press organization . . . and we thought that maybe the members of the little mag distribution panel should be the first board of directors. Interested?”

  “Why not? Sounds good to me.”

  So that afternoon at five in the student union at U. Cal., Berkeley, COSMEP began. It was supposed to be the CO-OP of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, but there was some law in California about the use of “CO-OP,” so it became the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, and I was on the board.

  Richard Morris became the Coordinator of the org.

  Him with his Ph.D. in Physics, trying to make a living writing books about Physics, Cosmology, the Beginning and the End of the Universe, What Makes Everything Work (or Not Work) . . . and eventually he was able to do it.

  But at this point in his career he needed a little extra financial help. Which COSMEP eventually was able to give him.

  We began as five or six, eventually ended up with a yearly budget of $60,000. Members all over the place. An annual convention, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, everywhere and anywhere, a spring get-together to plan things, which always meant another trip to San Francisco, staying at the Pacific Heights Bed and Breakfast.

  I bought an annual copy of Fulton’s International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, started submitting poetry everywhere, subscribed to his Small Press Review, began to do reviews for the SPR . . .

  Suddenly I was in with Flynn.

  Harry Smith and I became instant friends, and when he heard I was going to spend the summer at Brown on a fellowship, he got all excited.

  “Man, you’ve gotta come visit us in Brooklyn Heights. I’ve got this place, you know . . . 69 Joralemon. Plenty of room for you and your wife . . .”

  “OK. Once I get settled in Providence.”

  “You’re gonna love it. Great town.”

  “Great.”

  Little did I know that once I’d gotten settled in East Lansing I’d been visiting Smith for more than twenty years, three or four times a year, working with him in the mansion, dinners with him and Marion and the kids . . . Uncle Hugh.-- Christmas Vacation, Easter Vacation,between semesters, during the summer. Would end up with my little place in the basement of his huge old brownstone mansion, would work on his mag (The Smith later turned into Pulpsmith) during the day, he’d take me out to dinner every night with his wife, Marion, and three kids, Rebecca, Lisa, Tristram...until finally one night his wife said, “Hugh, you’re Uncle Hugh from now on...I’ve adopted you as my brother.”

  And it wasn’t just Smith that I became pals with either, but a vast army of writers and editors like Curt Johnson, editor of December magazine, Highland Park, just north of Chicago. Also editor and publisher of Who’s Who in American Poets and Authors.

  “When you’re in the Chicago area, come see me, OK?”

  Which I also did.

  There were two Hugh Foxes: Hugh Fox I, the academic nerd, Pre-COSMEP Fox, and Hugh Fox II, Mr. In, the Belle (Doorbell) of the Ball, Underground Whiz Kid who knew everyone in this vast mafiosa-like gang called the Literary Underground.

  Still, it was hard to leave California and move to Michigan. My old buddy, Joe Schwartz and his family, the Wickers, Ted Erlandson, my boss, Warren Sherlock, head of the drama department, Frank Miyaki, the Japanese gardener, Brian Avery and Penelope Chandler, Budd Hopps over in the development office . . .

  Not to mention my ties to Los Angeles itself, Playa del Rey, Santa Monica, UCLA, Hollywood. I’d become Mr. Palm Tree Foreign Films, loved to go out and see something like Peter Lorre in M., loved the new film festivals at UCLA, loved the downtown market and Chinatown, Big Bear Lake, the desert . . .

  But I was glad to get away from my nasty, vindictive, punishing ass parents and frozen salary.

  Passed through East Lansing on the way to Rhode Island, bought a house near the university, paid a couple of months of payments, met Ben Strandness, the head of the department where I’d be teaching, ATL (American Thought and Language), which I thought was American Studies.

  But Dean Carlin, dean of University College, of which ATL was part, set me straight the first day I visited him.

  “So how do you like it here in East Lansing?”

  “Great. Nice campus. Love the river running through it all. Like Harvard. All the gardens, everything tagged, identified for the botany/agronomy students. The students look serious, decent; I always taught American Literature classes at Loyola, but lots of freshman comp, too. I’ll be glad to get away from that—”

  “Perhaps you misunderstand the nature of the ATL department,” the dean (small, wiry, more steel spring than flesh and blood) answered wryly, “what it essentially is is freshman comp . . .”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s right.”

  I quickly revised my whole vision of my future.

  “Great.”

  “Freshman comp in an American studies context.”

  “Perfect.”

  A couple of days of “introduction” to East Lansing, then up, up and away to the east coast.

  The John Carter Brown Library.

  We found a nice little apartment, me, Lucia and the three kids.

  Loved being so close to the ocean. Loved Brown itself. A lot older than Michigan State, more stately, subdued, a little snobby maybe, but that was OK. They gave me a little “office” in the John Carter Brown Library, and the first thing I asked was “Is there anything around here that’s ‘unusual,’ that no one has ever looked at before?”

  The chief librarian hesitated for a moment.

  “Well, there is one huge collection of ‘stuff’ that some professor collected over the years, willed to us on his death. All about Spain, Spanish economics . . . lots of it manuscripts, sixteenth and seventeenth century. I don’t know how he ever got his hands on the stuff, but no one has ever looked at it, much less used it . . .”

  “Just my sort of thing.”

  I went down and looked at it.

  Difficult to read sixteenth and seventeenth cent
ury Spanish handwriting. Like reading the handwriting of Elizabeth I or Henry VIII.

  And the grammar had changed over the centuries.

  Took me a while to get used to it. But get used to it I did, wrote an article about it (which, of course, got published).

  Discovered another library on the campus, just a short distance away, the John Hay Library, that had all sorts of avant-garde stuff from the 1900s, 1920s. Manuscripts, rare magazines; it was a real find. Like the COSMEP crowd, really, only their antecedents, predecessors. I discovered a guy named Abraham Lincoln Gillespie: A.L. Gillespie. Started to put together a collection of his work out of little mags, a couple of years later met the madcap, experimental poet-publisher (Something Else Press) Dick Higgins and when I told him I had a collection of Gillespie stuff he jumped out of his seat, “Wild, Fox! I’ve been collecting Gillespie for years, too; let’s see what you’ve got . . .”

  Much the same stuff that I’d collected, but he had some things that I didn’t have and I had some things he didn’t have. Was going to publish the volume, had it all printed up, ready to go—and he went bankrupt.

  So it goes.

  I took Harry Smith up on his offer and went and visited him in Brooklyn Heights. Lucia and I stayed overnight in his basement apartment, and the next day, while she was playing around in stores on Fifth Avenue and all the stores around Harry’s office that sold things that hadn’t sold anywhere else, he took me down to the office and I met the Smith gang, editor Sidney Bernard, this aging hippy with a braided ponytail and the most meticulous, careful multiply-rewritten-reworked prose style in the world, Tom Tolnay, mystery writer (The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) and assistant editor, artist Jim Kay . . .

  Very impressive office. Five Beekman Street. Just down the street from City Hall, no less.

  Went out to lunch at a place called Suerkins. Harry ate oysters, oysters, and more oysters.

  A guy named Richard Nason came to lunch with us.

  Writing a book called The New Dunciard. And Harry was subsidizing him, keeping him afloat. Nason would give x number of pages to Harry and Harry would write him a check.

  Harry paid for everyone’s lunch.

  The guy was loaded.

  His wife, Marion, had come from this old Jewish-Czech family (in mining, no less) who had gotten their money out of Czechoslovakia before Hitler.

  They were so rich in fact that the U.S. embassy in Prague today is what had been their “town house.”

  Stanley Nelson, another Brooklyn poet, was there for lunch, too.

  Another impressive writer; author of The Brooklyn Book of the Dead.

  The next day we drove out to the Catskills and visited Menke Katz, the great Kabbalist-poet.

  All of a sudden I was in, in, in, in, in with gin, time to begin: my career as an artiste.

  I had come across some great poetry by Diane Wakoski, called her up, went to see her.

  I’d just had my book on Bukowski published by Abyss Publications in Sommerville (across the river from Boston), why not a book on Wakoski. Bukowski, Wakoski.

  It was a book that never worked out though.

  She was just on the edge of changing from a personal, gutsy experimental writer to becoming The Establishment. She in fact ended up as Poet in Residence at Michigan State, so we became (rather "distant") neighbors.

  And she changed radically after she left New York, became very un-Bukowskian/personal/confessional/streetwise, and turned into one of the New York School type poets, very un-underground, very much The Prof, very overgroundish. So I ended up never writing a book about her after all.

  Wrote my next book, in fact, on Lyn Lifshin, who I met at a COSMEP conference in Massachusetts.

  During my summer at Brown I got to know lots of the Boston underground world, too: Sam Cornish, Ottone Riccio, Jerry Dombrowski, Jean Laier, Bill Costley.

  Jean Laier, in fact, in her place just outside Boston, all hills and trees and ponds, had a big party for me and invited everyone.

  Talk about being In with Flynn, man!

  I had changed from Mr. Isolated to Mr. Know-Everybody. Of course I’d learned a lot about socializing with the literati when I was in Caracas, but here it was applied to my own country.

  Dombrowski did a book about John Brockman, a very avant-garde New York writer who always wrote about the history of civilizations/cultures, a kind of mega-thinker intellectual historian.

  I wrote a chapter for the book, met Brockman in New York, and when he abandoned his literary career and became an agent, he asked me if I might be interested in being one of his clients.

  Interested?

  What the hell. That’s how I got The Gods of the Cataclysm published by Harper’s Magazine Press and First Fire (an anthology of Amerindian writings) as a Doubleday Anchor Book.

  An incredible sense of suddenly being somebody. Of course (with my ego) it's what I'd always expected, Nobel prizes to just fall from the skies.

  Then fall came and I moved to East Lansing

  and . . .

  In my department, the Department of American Thought and Language, ATL, we had “readers.” Big classes, and we weren’t expected to grade all the papers alone, but have a little help in the form of a reader.

  Bessey Hall.

  Michigan State.

  Nice big office in a nice modern building.

  I got all settled in and was sitting there, a couple of days before classes were to begin, working on a new electric typewriter I’d just bought, when there was a knock on the door.

  “Come on in, it’s open.”

  And in comes this tall, thin cutesy-pooh, brown suede up-to-the-knee boots and matching (very short) skirt, light-skinned but black-haired and -eyed, radiating, what? Hornyness? Hunger? Sexual desperation?

  “What can I do for you?”

  Sitting down. Legs, legs, legs, legs. Of course, as always, I was horny as hell. Lucia was still pouting about leaving California, being in Michigan at all. When I’d tried to have a little sex with her a few days earlier she’d even said

  “Yo no quiero tener nada mas contigo . . . es mejor encontrar alguien en la calle.” (I don’t want to have anything else to do with you . . . it’s better to find someone in the street.)

  So Ms. Legs’ legs wound around my psyche like giant pythons . . . and I loved it.

  “I’m Nona Werner, your new reader.”

  “Reader?”

  “I help you great papers.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I’m married to an urpy psychology major named Donald. You’ll meet him, don’t worry, and I’m working for my Ph.D. in English. Originally from Kansas. You might detect a bit of ‘flavor’ in my drawl. But you ought to hear my mother when you come into her house: ‘Come on right in!,’ pure Texas. Forty years in Kansas, but you’d think she got there yesterday. You’ll have to come down to Kansas and meet my parents sometime . . .”

  “OK, sounds good.”

  “How about a little coffee? My treat. We can go over to the student union.”

  So we walked over to the student union and talked for a couple of hours.

  I had never met anyone brighter, more energetic, at the same time down to earth, simpatica, down-home-folks.

  She’d gone to the University of Kansas for her undergraduate degree, was getting her M.A. from MSU, and then would go on for the Ph.D. in English.

  She obviously didn’t get along with her husband, Donald, and I saw why when Lucia and I went over to Nona’s place for a huge baked-ham-potato-salad-apple pie “lunch” the following Sunday.

  When dinner was served up, Donald came in and looked at the huge ham and all the baked potatoes and apple pie with its fancy crisscross-on-top crust, sat down and said “It’s like homesteading. It’s more than lunch, it’s a study in Kansas history.”

  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

  Nona had invited a German neighbor of hers for lunch, too: Hildegarde. Getting a Ph.D. in physics.

  “I tried to get Nona to go into physics
too, but she likes it lean and lonesome . . .”

  “Lean and lonesome?” Nona asked, flabbergasted.

  “You’ll find out after you get your first post-Ph.D. job, isn’t that right, Hugh?’

  “Well, it’s OK as long as we eat lots of produce and keep the burners on low.”

  “Another member of the Voluntary Poverty Club!!”

  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

  He was getting his Ph.D. in psychology; expected big bucks at the end of the academic tunnel.

  Nona and I started having coffee every day, and by Christmastide we were practically a couple.

  One day, when Lucia and the kids were out at the movies, Nona dropped in. I was, as always, upstairs, writing.

  I came down, opened the door.

  “It’s only me.”

  Boots and tights and legs and luscious lips.

  She came in, I double-locked the door and we fell into each other’s arms down on the floor. I was a tarantula who hadn’t had a bite of anyone/anything for centuries, Christ coming out of the tomb on Easter, triumphant and glorious . . .

  It just happened. It couldn’t have not happened. Right there on the rug in the living room. No refinements, soft music, cappuccino cafe, just primal, bestial, ancient built-in instinct.

  And when it was over, we lay there in each other’s arms staring at the ceiling.

  “I can’t believe it happened . . .”

  “The way it did,” she added.

  “I can’t believe it happened the way it did.”

  Got dressed. She left, went home, and left Donald. It was that simple. Like she had been waiting for me/the excuse for centuries. Ein, zwei, drei, out.

  I didn’t tell Mimi right away, but every night (remembrances of time past, my years in Los Angeles) I would go to bed, then get up and go over to Nona’s new apartment on Lilac street, right across the street from the university, and we’d toss and twirl and loop the loops for hours, sleep a while, and then I’d be back home at dawn, never missed a beat, a class, anything.

  Finally I took my son, Hughie, over with me one afternoon to meet my “girlfriend,” and, of course, he spilled the beans to Lucia the minute he got home: “It’s that girl whose house we went to for apple pie and ham; that’s his girlfriend.”