by Sanders, Ed
The cop cursed. He grabbed a finger and pressed it onto the card, trying to roll my finger himself. But the card was too smudged to use. “C’mon, cooperate!” he hissed. I contemplated deliberately twitching my fingers with each attempt, but I didn’t really want to get beaten up by a bunch of guards. I ruined four fingerprint cards before the set was finally complete, by which time a superior officer was waiting in the room, his carotid pulsing rapidly on a florid neck above a tight white collar bearing golden adornments. Mr. Florid Neck grabbed the finger card and raced away to run the prints. “Aha! Now we’ll check you out right away!”
A few minutes later a gray school bus with barred windows drove the fresh prisoners up through the Bronx and then to a ferry that slowly thrashed through Long Island Sound to Hart Island. I told prison officials I was a journalist and a poet and hinted that I might write an article about jail conditions. Apparently the prison staff assigned someone to check this out because I was approached three times while on Hart Island and was asked things like “How’s the article coming along?” and “How are they treating you? Be sure and send us a copy of the article.”
We were processed into the citadel, after which there was a nude stroll through a milky-hued footbath and a check for cooties. At the clothes bin we were given some stiff black shoes, loose jeans, blue shirt, towels, and thick green overcoat. Never in my life had such a negative rush of immediate boredom stormed my soul.
The Death of Bennie Paret
I used to see boxer Emile Griffith, sporting a beret, walking on Times Square. Sometimes he would come into the cigar store where I worked the night shift. He was a popular figure on the street and was well recognized.
The night of my second day on Hart Island, March 24, 1962, there was a televised fight for the welterweight world championship between Bennie “Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith. It was a grudge battle. Kid Paret, a former Cuban sugar-field worker brought to temporary riches via face-punch, had been the champion. Emile Griffith took away the crown in early 1961 by a knockout. Paret then recaptured the crown on July 30, 1961, in a hotly disputed decision. An angry feud developed. Rather than fading gracefully into retirement, Paret was pressed from all sides to continue his career and a further face-punch was arranged. The jail dorm was totally silent and dark save for the tube. The dorm guard sat with feet on the desk, watching the fight. The convicts sat on their bunks and stared. During the early rounds Griffith seemed the casual winner. In the twelfth round Paret was snuffed.
Griffith backed Paret into the corner ropes. Bash. Paret fell against the padded corner brace, his head and upper body jutting at an angle outside the ring. Then there were twenty quick bashes on Paret’s face and head: baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf, baf. The referee stood staring. The dormitory was staring. Everybody was staring. In Miami the fighter’s wife watching the battle on TV screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!”
The final scene for the TV-starers showed Paret bent back, eyes closed, loose light-colored trunks with wide stripes down the side, his kidneys pressed against the corner padding, his left arm hanging defenseless at his side, his right arm still cocked but skewered to the side. Griffith was still bashing.
Finally, at 2:09 of the twelfth round, the referee, Ruby Goldstein, yelled, “Hold it!” and threw his arms around Griffith to prevent further hits. Griffith was loath to stop and made a lunge or so to continue—then subsided. And Paret slid down to a crouch, his knees askew. The lowest of the three parallel ring ropes was hooked under his right shoulder, his arm still jutting upward in a fighting posture.
He was in a coma. They removed his mouthpiece—and carried him away. In a few minutes the TV announcer mentioned that Paret had been given last rites. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where a doctor gave him “chances of recovery one in ten thousand.”
Shortly thereafter the guard switched off the TV. Lights out. No conversation. I lay stunned in the gloom and spat out the side of the bunk, as if a ptooey! could exorcise what I had just seen. I didn’t know whether to pray for Paret or to fall into a frothing rage at the so-called art of boxing. I made a personal vow that if there ever were an actual revolution and if I were ever in an orb of power over the People’s Bureau of Athletics, then I’d try to ban boxing.
On my bunk I tried to pray for the injured boxer. A few days later the poor man died. But I couldn’t get the fight out of my mind. It echoed with the baf baf baf baf baf baf and the bloodlust roar and the tense blood-stare silence of the dormitory.
I served my ten days at the Hart Island Workhouse, where I began writing the Times Square poems that would appear in a couple of years in my book Peace Eye. A fictional account of the AEC sit-in is in the story of the same name in Tales of Beatnik Glory.
An Unself-Confident Egomaniac
I was chasing what Ezra Pound called “the white stag of fame.” I was certainly not alone in that chase. During my years in the Lower East Side Hunter Thompson called me at home when he was promoting his book on the Hells Angels and Terry Southern was assiduous in promoting himself; Allen Ginsberg raced into the offices of the New York Times demanding it review Howl and Other Poems back in 1956.
I guess I was one of those unself-confident egomaniacs that Jack Kerouac alludes to in the opening lines of The Subterraneans. I sent copies of F.Y. to Pablo Picasso, Samuel Beckett in Ussy-sur-Marne, Nikita Khrushchev, Jean Paul Sartre, Charles Olson in Gloucester, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Allen Ginsberg care of an American Express office in India (Ted Wilentz of the 8th Street Bookshop had given me Allen’s address). I also sent the magazine to Edward Dahlberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and others. As I roamed around the bars, galleries, and coffeehouses of lower New York City, I gave away thousands of free copies of my publications.
Samuel Beckett, I once read, showed someone the F.Y. I had mailed to Ussy-sur-Marne, but he never sent me text to publish.
I took part in the Nashville-Washington Walk for Peace from late April into early June. The summer of 1962 I resumed working the 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift at the cigar store on Forty-second Street, and I continued writing a sho-sto-po, or short story poem, about Consuela and her adventures on Times Square, inspired by an actual person and filled with my researches into ancient Egyptian language and religion.
That summer I met a wild young guitarist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, named Steve Weber. He was the only guy I spotted on Avenue A those months barefoot, playing a guitar with all kinds of stickers and small pieces of artwork glued to it. I noticed his mother showed up now and then to check on her son, but she left him to his explorations. Three years later Weber would play electric guitar for the early Fugs.
Two friends, John Harriman and Paul Prenske, opened the Cantina of the Revolutions on East Ninth Street near Avenue C. It was a place to hang out that summer of’62. You paid what you could for homemade soup and coffee.
The Charles Theater and Ron Rice’s Flower Thief
I continued hanging out at the Charles Theater during 1962, handing out issues of my magazine to any and all. I’ll always remember filmmaker Ron Rice in green shoes at a reception at the Charles, where his film Flower Thief was shown with success during the summer of 1962. Rice’s movie was an inspiration for Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, filmed a few weeks later. And it was an inspiration for me, publishing the early issues of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts in my black-painted pad at 509 East Eleventh, just a few hundred feet from the Charles. And, of course, just across the street from the Charles, the cold mugs of bock beer at Stanley’s.
F.Y., issue number 2, April 1962, and F.Y., issue number 3, June 1962
At a party that year I saw Ron rushing in naked to toss a cat at Tiny Tim, who was performing with his ukulele. Ron seemed heroic, operating with flashes of genius in what I interpreted as voluntary poverty, the hallmark of the Catholic Worker movement and the Committee for Nonviolent Action.
Outside the Charles that summer I met legendary Beat hero Tu
li Kupferberg, who was selling his magazine Birth. I gave him an issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, and he promised to send a poem to Box 193, Stuyvesant Station. I was very happy to meet Tuli. It was the beginning of The Fugs and a lifelong friendship. As for Stuyvesant Station, I started getting letters addressed to
A typical letter to the magazine in the ’60s.
Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts
Box 193
Stuyvesant Station
NY, NY 10009
And, mirabile dictu, during the three-year history of the magazine, no one at the post office objected; they just stuck the letters in my box. I was always grateful, and to this day my opinion of the United States Postal Service is shaped toward the good.
A Polished Poem from Jail
Friends such as Jean Morton urged me to publish Poem from Jail. So finally I gulped and sent it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Book. To my shock, he replied in July ’62, interested in publishing it. Ferlinghetti marked up the manuscript so much that I dared to recall Ezra Pound marking up T. S. Eliot’s early draft of “The Waste Land” in 1931.
In the poem, I had several lines about Madame Chiang Kai-Shek:And Madame
Chiang Kai-Shek
too old now
to fuck for the
China Lobby
Ferlinghetti would insist when he printed the poem as a book in altering the text to And Lady
. . .
too old now
to fuck for the China Lobby
“You’ll get sued, his soldiers will come for you,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti jotted next to the lines. I heeded most of his suggestions and prepared a new manuscript, which I sent and he accepted for publication. At last I was being published where “the best minds” of my generation gathered!
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s comments on text in Poem from Jail.
The “Freaking” Issue of F.Y.
In August I put out the fourth issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. It brought to the fore the question of freakiness and insanity. At a dinner party I had attended once with George Plimpton, Robert Lowell, and a well-known New York editor, the editor had told us that “most of my friends believe that they’re insane.” It’s true—my generation tended to view freakiness and insanity as something positive. The Latin adage mens sana in sano corpore, “a sound mind in a sound body,” became for us mens insana in a fucked-up corpore.
Two events in the second half of 1962 shaped my perception for the rest of the 1960s: the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Cuban missile crisis.
The peace sign surrounded by an ouroboros, with the surrounding words “Freedom, Freaking, Fucking, Fertility” and “in this Issue, MAD MEN!”
The Death of Marilyn Monroe
When I was in high school, the opening scene of Monroe’s movie Niagara, with the beauty writhing in maenad-bacchic eroticism on a bed in her sleep, was one of the most charged visions I’d had up to that moment. It stayed with me right up to the news that she had passed away. Totally unknown to me at the time, across town a fairly unknown artist named Andy Warhol would soon begin a series of hand-painted portraits of Marilyn on silkscreen prints of a photo from Niagara.
I had watched Kennedy’s birthday party on May 19, televised to a fascinated nation. Marilyn Monroe sang a bedroom-beckoning version of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” resplendent in a clingy silver gown covered with sequins that seemed to have been grafted to her curves. Some history books aver that the star of Niagara had an affair with the president during these months. It’s a murky cloud of Clio, the Muse of History, and something we had no inkling of as we watched Marilyn sing that night, but shortly after the famous rendition of “Happy Birthday” Kennedy cut off access from the actress, including to a special number at the White House he had set aside for her.
According to a book by reputable chronicler Anthony Summers, “Monroe would not accept that the affair was over.” In an interview with Kennedy family friend Peter Lawford, he said, “Marilyn began writing these rather pathetic letters to Jack and continued calling. She threatened to go to the press.”
As for Monroe, she had been in the midst of a film for 20th Century Fox called Something’s Got to Give with Cyd Charisse, Dean Martin, and others when she interrupted the film to fly to New York City for “Happy Birthday.” A few days later she came down with severe sinusitis, during which filming was delayed, and then she was fired on June 8. In the eleven weeks left to her, she worked to revive her picture so that by the day she passed away, she had won! It was to be rebegun! aided apparently by a phone call from Robert Kennedy to the head of Fox pictures.
She’d won her struggle to restart her picture and was looking ahead to new projects, one of which was a musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She spoke with composer Jule Styne about the score that final week. But then on a street called Fifth Helena in Brentwood, Los Angeles, her housekeeper saw the light on in her room at midnight on August 5 and then at 3:00 AM but was hesitant to wake her because she had been having trouble sleeping. The housekeeper called Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, who arrived at 3:30 to find Marilyn lying face down in death, a phone “clutched fiercely in her right hand,” as he later wrote.
A swirl of rumors and variously fact-founded allegations have dust-deviled the time track since. There were her “powerful paramours”—for which read John Kennedy—and others who fucked her but “withheld their hearts”; and there was her legendary diary, with its jotted-down disclosures of Camelot. Did she die by accident when unknown people drugged her and then searched for the diary? Or was it some sort of intelligence hit to blackmail the president? What the hell was it? Or was it a self-hit from someone desperately unhappy and hungry for the long sleep of eternity, the perpetua dormienda that Catullus sang?
The issue whether visited the day she died has not been resolved. That weekend, according to Arthur Schlesinger’s RFK and His Times, Robert Kennedy was in San Francisco for a meeting of the American Bar Association. He stayed with Ethel and four of their kids at a ranch in Gilroy southeast of San Francisco. A helicopter south that Saturday was theoretically possible; so, too, was the chance that he may have helicoptered out of Los Angeles late that night or early Sunday.
Marilyn Monroe’s death was a blow to the nation entire. It sang a sadness and a threnody through the time track of the greater culture. Frenzied media oozathons following celebrity suicides spur self-offs. “There was a 12 percent jump in suicides in the US in the month following Marilyn Monroe’s death from a sleeping pill overdose in 1962,” according to a story in New Scientist, October 10, 2009, headlined “Media Reports of Monroe’s Death Fuelled Mass Suicides.”
A Party for Marilyn at Nelson Barr’s
The night of Marilyn’s death Nelson Barr threw a combination party and wake at his pad on the second floor at Avenue B and Twelfth, just across the street from Stanley’s. It was a wild night of Rheingold beer in 25¢ quarts, pot, and more than a few pills. I wound up sleeping on the floor, I was so wasted, instead of walking around the corner to my own pad.
Elin Paulson was also at the party. She was a free-spirited young woman on the Catholic Worker staff. I often satirized her in my “Notes on Contributors.” We were never intimate, but she had submitted some erotic poetry to the magazine, which, to my regret, I never published, partly because, even though the poetry was well worth putting to ink, it was mailed to me in a Catholic Worker envelope and would surely have gotten her tossed off the Worker. I still held the CW in awe, in spite of my anarcho-Egypto-bacchic persona. (The poem, still residing safely in my archive, is a testimony to eros, beginning with the words “Sex is . . .” and proceeding with a sequence of groovy, brief, hortatory lines.)
That night I spotted a marble statue, beautifully carved, that apparently had served as a fountain or had been inundated over the years. Nelson told me it had been in the apartment when he first rented it. He gave the statue to me, and I lugged it back home. I still have it, in all its exquisitenes
s. I’ve wondered for decades whether I accidentally acquired a long-lost Michelangelo!
Three weeks later I mimeographed Poems for Marilyn, with contributions by me, Joel Oppenheimer, John Harriman, Taylor Mead, Al Fowler, and John Keys. I read my contribution at Café Le Metro. The poem contained an ill-advised criticism of one of Marilyn’s husbands, and poet Calvin Hernton yelled out, “Hey, I like Arthur Miller!”
The night of Marilyn statue. Is this a Michelangelo? Readers, please help me!
Since I had printed a piece by Taylor Mead in Poems for Marilyn, there has been the speculation that Mead might have shown it to his good friend Andy Warhol, thus providing maybe just a sliver of inspiration for the famous series of hand-adorned silkscreens of Marilyn he began shortly after her demise.
Warhol’s Silkscreens
By the early 1960s Warhol had had a number of exhibitions and he was known as a skilled draftsman. In the summer of 1962 he began experimenting with silkscreening images onto painted canvas. The results were startling images that would place him at the forefront of modern art. The spirit of the aleatory, that is, of John Cage’s chance operations, which Cage featured in his compositions, came into play in these early silkscreens, when talent overwhelmed technique. I was friends at the time with Warhol’s assistant, poet Gerard Malanga, who told me about some of the casual and accidental silkscreen results.