Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side

by Sanders, Ed

  Andy had a showing of his hand-painted Campbell’s Soup works in Los Angeles that July, and then, just as it closed, Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper found her dead at thirty-six, a sleeping pill vial beside her. Marilyn appealed to a vast variety of Americans, from Beatnik loners to pop artists to people of power. J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, head of the FBI, had a nude photo of Monroe in his basement rec room in Washington, DC. Andy Warhol began a series of twenty-three Marilyn paintings utilizing his new technique of combining painting and screening.

  Working at the NYU Purchasing Department

  Warhol silkscreened the early Marilyns at just about the time I began working at the NYU purchasing department, where I monitored purchase orders for all the NYU divisions. It was a full-time job, requiring me to wear a sports coat and slacks, but I could get free tuition—useful because I wanted to continue my struggle to get a degree in Greek. My wife, Miriam Sanders, was a full-time student at NYU, studying geology. We were not yet living together, though we had been a couple since we met in Greek class back in the fall of 1958 and had gotten married in October 1961. Soon after going to work at NYU, I began taking classes again.

  James Meredith

  I was getting more and more into a defiant, American Bacchus state of mind. We were enjoying the fall weather, publishing and writing, reading a lot of books, and in general secretly reveling in the “rising tide of expectation” that the Kennedy administration was causing, while using our freedoms to criticize criticize criticize.

  After the brilliant success of the violence-tinged Freedom Rides of the previous year, the civil rights movement was in full swing by the fall of 1962, thanks in good part to the work of Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and decisions by the Supreme Court, which featured great Americans such as Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and Hugo Black.

  An air force veteran named James Meredith had been denied admission to the University of Mississippi. The NAACP took up his case in federal court; then, to the glory of time, RFK’s Justice Department joined the case. In early 1962 a federal appeals court ruled that Old Miss’s denial was unconstitutional. Then on September 10, just before the Cuban missile crisis, Justice Hugo Black ordered Mississippi to admit Meredith. Those of us following it in the Lower East Side were clinking mugs in jubilance in Stanley’s Bar. Of course, a good number of civil rights partisans thought the Kennedys were moving much too slowly.

  Thereupon Meredith twice sought to walk into Old Miss to enroll, and the governor of Mississippi himself, one Ross Barnett, blocked Meredith in person. Robert Kennedy put pressure on Barnett, threatening arrest of the governor and a $1,000 a day fine, at which he caved and Meredith gained admittance at the end of September. Another round of mugs clinked at Stanley’s!

  But when Meredith brought his belongings to the campus on September 13, two weeks prior to the missile crisis, a mob hurled rocks and bottles and three people died. The next day President Kennedy sent 3,000 federal troops, 400 U.S. Marshalls, and National Guardsman to Old Miss to make the point that real change was occurring.

  A Spine-Chilling Speech

  Then came the Cuban missile crisis. A bunch of my friends gathered around the TV set on the counter behind the bar at Stanley’s, watching Kennedy’s October 22 speech to the nation—one of the most fear-producing talks in hearthside history. He sketched out the missile sites in Cuba for a quiet, nervous nation of living rooms and bars and announced an air-and-sea blockade of the island, with shot-of-liquor-and-hit-of-hash-inducing sentences such as “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

  I prophesied a wild ride in a wild decade. “You just wait,” I predicted to my table of friends. “The rest of the sixties are going to be very turbulent!” There was considerable anger at the Kennedys at Stanley’s. Of course, we did not have all the behind-the-scene facts as we groused and growled, calling JFK a warmonger. We had no idea, for instance, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were growling themselves for a first strike on Cuba without warning. And unaware for years that Chief of Staff of the Air Force Curtis Lemay, chomping on his cigar, angry that Kennedy was deciding on a blockade rather than a massive air strike without warning, complained that a blockade instead of an air attack was “worse than Munich.”

  People were very afraid. I know I was. I lay down a sleeping bag on a Japanese mat in my apartment. As a kind of votive tableau, I placed an oval of burning candles around my sleeping bag. Then about 3:00 AM or so I drifted to sleep. Would I wake up in other dimensions?

  Later I read that Bob Dylan wrote his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, about the same night, “Sitting in the Figaro all nite waiting for the world to end (the first nite Kennedy talked and the Russian ships were getting nearer Cuba). I honest to God thought it was all over—Not that I gave a shit any more then the next guy (that’s a lie I guess) but it was interesting waiting for the bombs to fall and kill you—and it really seemed that way.”

  Ah, so it was, as I lay amid the burning candles, my Speed-o-Print mimeo in the distant flickers, stacks of mimeo’d magazines in the doomy gloom, prepared for the End.

  The Fall of ’62

  I was working at NYU by day and at the cigar store on Forty-second Street during the weekends. I began experimenting with making sculptures. There was a store across the street from my apartment called H. L. Wild, which carried woodcarving supplies, and I purchased a bunch of woodcarving tools and a mallet of lignum vitae. I created a sculpture of my Peace Eye vision from a log of lignum vitae, which remains in my writing studio to this day, the only remnant of my exploration into sculpting.

  I was also beginning to hang out at the Living Theater, then located on the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Organized and inspired by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the theater was a nexus for what was going on in the underground. There, in early September ’62, I experienced the buzz of participating in my first benefit poetry reading! It was organized by Bonnie Bremser for her husband, poet Ray Bremser, who had just been arrested. As publisher of four issues of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, plus just now, hot off the Speed-o-Print, the Poems for Marilyn anthology , I was being afforded a glimmer of underground renown. I read along with a broad cross section of poets on the New York scene, including Ed Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Philip Lamantia, John Wieners, Diane di Prima, and Herbert Huncke. Paintings by Elaine de Kooning and Sherman Drexler were on sale to benefit Bremser. Music by Cecil Taylor! Later, in the December’62 issue of F.Y., I published two poems written by Ray while he was in the Tombs.

  The Peace Eye log.

  The Ray Bremser benefit. Clippings in the author’s archives.

  Drawing on Stencils by Flashlight

  Around the time of the missile crisis, I began work on drawing and typing the stencils for a double issue of F.Y., volume 5, numbers 1 and 2. I had an idea for one of the covers showing Little Orphan Annie in an erotic pose. It took me many hours to draw with various styli the image of Annie and her dog. The lights were shut off in my pad, and I drew the stencils by holding a flashlight beneath the stencil and then cutting with the styli.

  The second cover was more of what I usually did: an image of Egyptian solarity and triumph. A Mayan-style sun glyph with flaming arms hovered above a solar barque with a stylized cobra head as a prow and bearing a walking cartouche with a large-eyed fish within, above which stretched an upreaching single Khepri/solar-dung-beetle claw.

  A double issue of the magazine, December’62.

  I was thrilled down to the anarcho-Egyptian bone that my hero Charles Olson had sent three Maximus poems to publish! But it was my “Talk of the Town” column, its heading, laboriously sketched by flashlight for one of the December ’62 issues, that got me into trouble.

  The Thrill of Sketching Hieroglyphs

  I loved to draw Egyptian glyphs and,
say, satires about the New Yorker onto mimeograph stencils. A few months later Ted Berrigan told me about a place that would, for about $1, burn an electronic stencil from a page of writing and drawing. But in the fall of ’62 I was still laboriously cutting the images onto stencils by means of sharp styli.

  The state of my Egyptian by 1962 was that I could sight-read the text on coffins at the Metropolitan Museum. There were bookstores I frequented south of Fourteenth, such as Orientalia on West Tenth, Samuel Weiser on Broadway, and a number of the famous stores on Fourth Avenue at the time, that stocked scholarly Egyptology books.

  There’s something thrilling about tracing a 3,000-year old papyrus or even improving an ancient sketch. I knew it as a young man drawing glyphs on mimeo stencils. I know it, too, in the years of gray—the hiero-thrill of sacred shapes.

  Trouble from My Editorial Notes

  That late fall, after the missile crisis, I was feeling ultradefiant. I ended the “Notes on Contributors” page for volume 5, number 1 with a cri de mimeo:

  “I’ll print anything,” I typed.

  I had rented the two-room apartment at 509 East Eleventh Street in December 1961 for $56 a month. It was on the third floor. One room was a combined kitchen and living room. The other was supposed to be a bedroom. There were no closets, only a five-pronged clothes rack nailed to the wall in the bedroom. The rooms were tiny, and both had lumpy metal ceilings stamped with leaflike patterns in six-inch squares. I kept my Speed-o-Print mimeo resting on a porcelainized metal cover on the bathtub, which was set up in the kitchen.

  I typed the mimeograph stencils. It was always a tedious chore requiring slow correction of mistakes with an erasing device and rubbery correction fluid that was brushed on the typo, blown dry with a breath-huff, and then retyped. Sometimes when I typed far past midnight by candlelight, the man next door began to pound the wall with a broom.

  After I typed the stencils, I ordered a few boxes of mimeo paper. When they were delivered, I began to print the new issue. I brushed the ink on the inside of the printing drum of the small mimeograph, and I attached a stencil on the outside of the drum, smoothed it out, checked the inking, put paper in the feeding tray, and began to turn the handle to print. I did this with a feeling of elation that was just about religious. Everything was deity. I adored this mimeograph machine and kept it sparkling clean. I sometimes would sit meditating on the bamboo mat, looking for hours at the Speed-o-Print sitting up on top of the bathtub.

  Bodhisattva Collating Method

  After all the pages had been printed, there remained the grim job of collating them. Because the magazine was usually around thirty pages in length, I could collate one whole issue at a time. I would sit cross-legged on the floor in the Bodhisattva position and nearly surround myself with three concentric semicircular rows of page piles. I worked left to right through the outer circle and then through the second half circle and finished with the last page by sweeping across the innermost row that surrounded much of my cross-legged body. I tamped each completed issue on the floor along the top and side edges to align the pages for later stapling. Slowly the pile of completed issues grew until I finally finished all five hundred.

  The next and last task was when clunk! clunk! clunk! I stapled each copy three times along the left edge. Whew. Then I addressed, stamped, and mailed out as many magazines as I could afford postage for. I sent the magazine to my poet friends, to other editors, to a few easily shocked high school buddies in the Midwest, and to those I admired, such as Samuel Beckett, Edward Dahlberg, and Marianne Moore. Plus I always filled up a musette bag to hand out free copies at the 8th Street Bookshop and at the various bars, such as the Cedar and Stanley’s. Stanley Tolkin would take a supply of an issue when it came out and keep copies at the bar to give out to those he knew would dig the magazine.

  The Beauty of Yum

  From urges unknown I started eating a strange concoction I called Yum. Yum and vitamin C, except for an occasional pierogi and sour cream feast at the nearby Odessa Restaurant, were my exclusive diet for months and months. What was Yum? Well, first I made a thick, dry two-inch bed of oats in a wooden bowl. On this I spooned two globs of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Next came generous drip-drops of soy sauce. Atop this mound of pure delight, I broke two fresh eggs and mixed the feast into a beige and yellow rippled blob. This was Yum. Want some?

  I ate Yum every day for eleven happy months. I was always very willing to share meals of Yum with any visitor arriving at dinnertime. There was often shyness or hesitation about sharing the meal on the part of the visitor who watched the editor prepare the wet, yellow Yum-mush. Miriam, for example, and friends such as Nelson Barr were loath to enjoy the paradise of Yum.

  I had never made out or even kissed Elin Paulson, but she was a pretty young poet and artist who had lived at one of the Catholic Worker apartments. She had hung out at the Cantina of the Revolutions on Ninth Street east of the park during the previous summer. She had submitted poetry to my magazine.

  Yet decades later I can’t help cringing at some of my editorial comments in the double issue about Elin, who had contributed some fine love poems to the issue. In the “Notes on Contributors” for volume 2 I made a strongly erotic statement about Elin. My editorial comments were very creative and occasionally not completely moored on the docks of absolute reality.

  One night around midnight I was reading by candlelight when there was a knock at the door. I found myself facing an angry man with two German shepherds who was upset—very upset—over what I had written about Elin. I had known that they were seeing each other but really had not noted the seriousness of the relationship.

  I could sense her passion for a loving relationship, although from a couple of the poems of hers I published, I could see she had, like many Beat/peace movement women, had a wobbly love course. Here are some sections from the poem (“With Love Still”) of hers I’d just printed:3.

  I did tell you things/

  & we played

  our kazoos

  4

  a song of love is a sad song

  hi lilly

  hi lilly

  hi lo

  a song of love is a song of woe

  don’t ask me how i know

  5

  Someday

  We

  Will

  Meet

  Again

  and

  stop

  wondering

  Standing there nervously in the candlelit gloom of my apartment, I did feel upset with myself that someone was unhappy over what I had printed with the intention of creating pleasure. And I well understood the jealousy and upset that could be involved. So I apologized and said to the man with the dogs that most of the magazine had already been mailed out but had I known of his concern, I certainly would not have printed the editorial description.

  After a few more minutes the man with the dogs left, saying as he did so that if I had not at least expressed some sort of apology, he would have beat me up. Decades later the gentleman apologized for arriving angry with the dogs.

  As for Elin, she had a son, Leif, with a writer named Bruce Grund, and she moved to a commune in northern Vermont, where she lived for around forty years, painting and creating beautiful artworks of stained glass. We kept in touch by letter. She sent me some of her art, and on her passing in 2006 of cancer, I drew a glyph in honor of her.

  Meeting Harry Smith and H. L. Humes

  In October 1962, just before the Cuban missile crisis and after my magazine had been mentioned by John Wilcock in his column in the Village Voice, I received a note from H. L. Humes, known universally as “Doc” Humes, a legendary New York novelist and one of the founders of the Paris Review. He wanted to get together, so we decided to meet at Stanley’s Bar. The place was packed. That night artist Larry Rivers was at the bar, sitting next to Mary Nichols of the Village Voice.

  Doc Humes and I were having a drink at a table. Suddenly he said, “There’s a magician I know.” He brought me to the b
ar to introduce me to filmmaker Harry Smith, who, amid the introductory chat, said he was working on a movie.

  He liked the Eyes of Horus I had painted on my white gym socks. He had a first edition of fierce English occultist Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies, which in the course of a drinking evening he threw into the tall porcelain urinal at Stanley’s Bar. There it resided until we left to go our separate ways. I kicked myself later for not retrieving it. He was effusive in his praise of Crowley’s writing that night, saying he was a genius, although that did not prevent the toss-away of the Book of Lies.

  I became aware of Smith’s own genius at string games, and his work as a filmmaker and artist, because I visited his small apartment uptown not far from the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and saw how his art suffused every wall. He said he had gotten a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to make a movie based on Gaston Maspero’s translation of the Egyptian Tale of the Two Brothers. He told me he used to meditate for up to a half hour underwater, submerged in his bathtub with a cover atop it, breathing from a tube. He had a brilliant antsiness.

  I had my usual satchel of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts and gave him an issue. We became friends. Later he drew on a stencil for F.Y.

  At first, I had only a vague idea that he was well known for his Anthology of American Folk Music. I quickly learned of his hand-drawn and exquisite short films. Out of deference to Harry I started reading Aleister Crowley.