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

  In the other room was my trusty Speed-o-Print mimeograph, reams of paper, and uncollated stacks of Fuck You Press publications. The compact mimeo fit nicely on the porcelainized metal bathtub cover in the kitchen. After I moved in my stacks of magazines and publications, I wasted very little time before I began to film at the Secret Location.

  A young woman named Mimi had submitted some poetry to F.Y. She was active around the Lower East Side set, and she had volunteered to type stencils. I would see her at readings at Le Metro. One night she said she’d be at a certain place. Then she canceled. Robert Creeley had a reading, and she said, “I want to fuck Creeley.” One afternoon she and Peter Orlovksy came over to the Secret Location. Soon they were naked and balling, and I was filming.

  Another film session was between poet Bill Szabo and a woman named Ellen B. I filmed them balling in my Jack Smith–esque film lair, brightly colored drapes on the wall and clip-on lights surrounding the gaudy-hued bed.

  Sketch of my Speed-o-Print from an issue of F.Y.

  Burnt by Herbert Huncke!

  One night in August 1963, just a few days after I had rented the Secret Location on Avenue A, legendary writer Herbert Huncke came in excited to the cigar store wanting to cash two checks totaling $47.50, drawn on the account of Florence Barta, reputedly a girlfriend. I was tending to the constant flow of customers for cigarettes and premovie candy and was a bit distracted. I cashed the checks for the fabled craggy-faced Beatnik (and later deposited them in my own account).

  He said, “Could you hurry? I have a cab waiting.”

  And lo! the bank returned the checks to me for insufficient funds! I complained to Allen Ginsberg, who told me not to worry, that it was a Beat-era badge of honor to be burned by Huncke. He told me his own experience of getting ripped off by Huncke, something about Huncke going into a house, then disappearing out the back. It was like being heckled by Gregory Corso at a reading—if it occurred, you were part of the in-crowd; the same was true with being burned by Herbert Huncke. The actual returned check can be found in the portion of my personal archive that resides at the University of Connecticut.

  My bank statement for August ’63, showing the burn by Huncke.

  The Living Theater

  I went to the Living Theater in the summer of ’63 to use the group’s typewriter to type stencils for the new issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. I remember Julian Beck’s parrot squawking in the office as I typed. The Living Theater had a production of The Brig, and Judith Malina and Julian Beck sponsored a “Jail Poets” reading on July 23, which I took part in. The Brig, which depicted life in a hell-like marine corps prison, had been up and running since May. Jonas Mekas would later in the year make a film of a performance.

  The Great March on Washington

  I went down to DC with the Living Theater to be a part of the Great March on Washington on August 28, 1963. I brought along my Bell and Howell, plus a satchel of the freshly published issue of my magazine.

  Some of those on the bus finally fell asleep, but most talked excitedly and every few minutes began singing, clapping, and stomping their feet through the long trip to DC. Over and over they sang the tunes that roused them and gave melodies to their philosophical passions: “If I Had a Hammer,” “Solidarity Forever,” “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “Dona Nobis Pacem.” There was a boisterous contingent who led the bus in “Cuba Sí, Yankee No,” “We Shall Wear the Red and Black,” and “The Internationale,” that fine old song from the 1870 Paris Commune.

  Pound at the Great March

  As soon as the Living Theater bus landed in DC, instead of heading toward the Lincoln Memorial, I ran with my camera and satchel of the new issue of F.Y. to the Library of Congress. “I’d like to take a look at the Ezra Pound broadcasts,” I told the librarian at the counter. I filled out the proper form and began research into what I called “The Lb Q,” short for Pound Question—that is, how to deal with his anti-Semitism against the background of his undeniable talents as a poet. Not many people that Washington day really thought much about the Lb Q, but to poets in the Beat, Black Mountain, Objectivist, or Deep Image tradition, it was a serious issue. If eyes were sandpaper, I would have long ago erased the texts in Pound’s collected earlier poems, Personae. His relentless scholarship, his mixture of tough and tender lyrics, and his love of Greek and Latin helped me become a poet.

  After the war, when I was in the first grade, Pound had been indicted for treason for his anti-Semitic World War II radio broadcasts from Italy. He’d then been placed in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in DC as bonkers. There’d been a big debate among writers when Pound won the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos while he was in the asylum. Some said he had been a traitor for his wartime broadcasts; others said he was a great poet and his poesy separated him from the broadcasts; others said he was a silly figment of prior times and should be forgotten. In 1963 at the time of the Great March on Washington, he had long been deloonybinned and was back in Italy.

  I wanted to see for myself, and I wasn’t sure how soon I would return to Washington. I was brought a packet of prints of broadcast transcripts, white text on dark background, which I quickly scanned. I found to my shock that the texts were phlegmed with “kikes,” “councils of kikes,” and “kikettes,” which were Pound’s code words for Franklin Roosevelt’s Cabinet:No one can qualify as a historian of this half century without having examined the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] [April 20, 1943].

  Talmudic Jews who want to kill off ALL the other races whom they cannot subjugate [April 20, 1942].

  American lynch law had its origins in the Jewish ruin of the American South [June 15, 1942].

  If you don’t find a leader, you may have to wait for some kind hearted Bavarian, or Hungarian to come free you from the Jews of New York [March 6, 1942].

  I said the Republicans would have all kikeria, all the kike profits out against’em in 1944 [March 16, 1943].

  For two centuries, ever since the brute Cromwell brought ‘em back into England, the kikes have sucked out your vitals [March 15, 1942].

  The USA will be no use to itself or to anyone else until it gets rid of the kikes AND Mr. Roosevelt [March 11, 1942].

  A few minutes were more than enough. I sprinted out of the marble data center, past the Capitol, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the White House, and the Washington Monument, eager to find my friends by the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

  I had never seen 200,000 people before. I located the Living Theater, and I started filming. I could hear a low-pitched, crackly noise rising from the multitude. It was my first experience with “mass-demo buzz,” which came not only from the low-threated roar of the multitude but also from hundreds at the edges shout-talking for causes and distributing a vastness of leaflets, magazines, pennants, buttons, pamphlets, and broadsides for left, liberal left, civil rights, and peace groups.

  I had brought with me the recent issue of F.Y., with a cover that two years and four months later would mightily offend the officer who led the raid on my bookstore. This is the issue where, in the “Notes on Contributors,” I announced, once again straying a bit from absolute reality, that I had the first fifty-three hieroglyphs of Akh-en-Aten’s “Hymn to the Sun Disc” tattooed on my private parts. This would be of great, gazing interest to the police sergeant who raided my bookstore a little more than two years later. I quietly handed out some copies to friends whom I was able to locate in the hundreds of thousands by the Lincoln Memorial and the long Reflecting Pool of Truth.

  F.Y., volume 5, number 4, printed to hand out at the Great March on Washington, August 1963.

  Filming the Nazis

  During the March I spotted a group of men scampering among the demonstrators. They would stop briefly and bend down above those who were sitting and then make strange quick jerking motions against their own noses with their hands. What was going on? The group came closer, and I saw the white circles with black swastikas on their armbands. One Nazi was
making soft spitting sounds and cursing in a whisper those sitting at the Great March, his hand tracing elongated rhine-lines with two fingers pressed together.

  I was very angry.

  Everybody was listening to the speeches and singing, and no one wanted to be distracted. I couldn’t remain passive while the hellmen of the ovens cursed those I loved. They had to be confronted. I hoisted my camera on the Stedi-Rest during Martin King’s speech. King finished and the roar of a mile-wide seashell began as the ovenmen scampered away.

  I thought of Ezra Pound as I filmed a minute or so of the ovenmen. Pound, who had helped me become a poet. Pound, on whom I had once relied for strength and ideas on creative rebellion. Pound, whose poetry had opened up my eyes almost as much as the poetry of Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allan Poe, Allen Ginsberg, and Sappho. Pound, who had let me down in the Library of Congress. Soon the Nazis scampered away, and I paid attention to Martin King’s final remarks.

  Birmingham Bombing

  A few days later, on September 15, came the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham—the very church from which the thousand children had come singing and praying back in May to begin liberating Birmingham, at least partially, from segregation. The night before some men of utter evil from the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb beneath a magnolia bush by a window. In the morning young women in the basement of the church were getting ready for youth services upstairs. There was a blast at 10:22 AM. Four girls lay dead in their choir robes: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, all fourteen, and Chris McNair, eleven. The damage was terrible. A stained-glass window somehow survived; only the face of Jesus was missing.

  Within months the FBI’s Birmingham office identified four of the Ku Klux Klanners who had bombed these children and urged J. Edgar Hoover to present this information to the Justice Department. But Hoover blocked it, a disgraceful lack of character that demands that Hoover’s name be taken off the FBI building in Washington.

  We did not know that Hoover was blocking the flow of information regarding the Birmingham bombing. All we knew was that it was going unsolved. The tone for the rest of 1963, after the glory of the Great March, became garish and cacophonous.

  September 7, 1963

  Miriam and I took a bus to Kansas City for my younger brother Robert’s wedding in my hometown, Blue Springs. We stayed in a hotel out on Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, paid for by my father, Lyle.

  I brought my Bell and Howell and shot footage at the wedding reception at the Lake Tapawingo Country Club. All of the partiers, maybe fifty to seventy-five people, seemed to be bent over, doing the twist. Later I tried to remember Brakhage’s advice on smooth filming as I lay, rather drunk, across the hood of the honeymoon car, my Bell and Howell 70DE battle camera whirring. I did manage to film the bride and groom as they drove away for their honeymoon.

  My brother Robert’s wedding, with my father, Lyle, the bride, Sherry, my brother Robert, my sister, Jacqueline, and me on the far right. The occasion for one of my first underground films. From Ed Sanders collection.

  The next morning, utterly hung over, I became a vegetarian when my father prepared steak and eggs in the hotel apartment rented for Miriam and me. It was an act of goodwill on my father’s part, but I had been considering vegetarianism ever since encountering cows by the roadside the previous year on the Nashville-Washington Walk for Peace.

  The Shutdown of the Living Theater

  Returning to New York with the wedding footage, I was faced with the closing by the feds of the Living Theater. It was an important place in my personal world. I had heard historic poetry readings there; I had first seen Bob Dylan perform as part of the General Strike for Peace in February ’62; we had tried to raise money for Ray Bremser’s defense; I had typed the stencils for the recent issue of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts; I had taken part in the Jail Poets reading, with each of us reading from the cage of Kenneth Brown’s starkly beautiful play The Brig.

  The Brig had been successfully running since May. It had attracted the attention of the federal government, which sicced the IRS on the Living Theater for unpaid taxes.

  The landlord cooperated with the IRS, and one day, without notice, the Becks were locked out. That night the audience, facing a locked front door, climbed over the roof and entered the performance space through the windows for one more performance of The Brig. After that the production moved briefly to the Midway Theatre on West Forty-second Street.

  Shortly thereafter the Living Theater split for Europe, not to return for a few years. It was a blow to the New York counterculture.

  The Fall of ’63

  I was torn between scholarship and the American underground. The banishment of the Living Theater just made me grit my teeth and become even more determined. But there was a bewildering list of directions I could have taken at that point. My life reminded me of a couple of lines in Poem from Jail—“Floodlights stagger / the sunflower,” or a line from Ginsberg’s “Poem Rocket,” from Kaddish and Other Poems: “Which way will the sunflower turn / surrounded by 1000s of suns?”

  A hand-drawn-on-stencil image from the “Notes on Contributors” page for the issue in which I printed Allen Ginsberg’s “The Change” more or less summed up my philosopher-king stance in the fall of ’63. I thought of myself as a theologian of Instant Gratification. Then came the assassination on a glary day, and instant gratification, or InGrat as I termed it later, began to get balanced by right-wing reality.

  Hoping to Help the Spark of Revolution

  As I have written, I believed in the spark of revolution, the iskra, that it could or would somehow burst out of a poetry café on Second Avenue or from the pages coming off my Speed-o-Print mimeograph in the Secret Location and sweep to rev. I was following a countertugging set of Arrows of Bewilderment.

  For the moment, the Arrows of Bewilderment were winning. I had discovered Greek lyric poetry, especially the complicated metrics of Sappho. I was translating Hesiod’s Theogony and corresponding with a number of my heroes, including Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Diane di Prima. And I was having the thrill of drawing on mimeograph stencils Egyptian hieroglyphs commingled with my own glyphs. I was making underground movies, had some good footage of the Great March on Washington, and was filming my friends here and there, including on the torrid floor mattress of my Secret Location in the Lower East Side.

  I was busy drawing stencils and gathering manuscripts for a new issue of F.Y., and I, like most in the Lower East Side, was somewhat oblivious to the “rumble of the right” that historic fall. The Birmingham bombing was a clue, as was the footage of the Nazis making nose signs at those listening to Martin Luther King at the Great March.

  On the political front there had been a hotline established between Moscow and Washington so that Kennedy and Khrushchev could talk each other out of any freaky propensity to wax nuke-batty. I had no idea that the right wing viewed that as appeasement and semitreason. I had no idea that the general in charge of the U.S. Air Force, Curtis Le May, viewed the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis without massive U.S. airstrikes as appeasement worse than Munich.

  Much information on the larger world, even in the Lower East Side, was obtained from morning scans of the New York Times. I probably should have put two and two together on October 3 when well-placed writer Arthur Krock wrote a column in which he quoted a “very high official” asserting that the CIA’s growth was like “a malignancy” that this official “was not sure even the White House could control . . . any longer.” “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government,” the official went on to remark, “it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon.”

  It seemed difficult, at best, to relate the outer world traced in the New York Times to the reality of my little world of underground movies, mimeo ink on my fingers, and coffeehouses with their wild verse. The Times also reported that when Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson g
ave a speech in Dallas on October 24, he was spat on, jostled, and jeer-sneered by Birch-brained crackers outside the Dallas Memorial Auditorium Theater.

  Meanwhile, I became friends with a young poet named Ted Berrigan. We met around the electric mimeograph at the Phoenix Bookshop at 18 Cornelia Street. Both of us used the mimeo to print our poetry magazines. He had just started a magazine called C. Like me, he had had trouble with the family of his future wife, Sandy, and had persevered.

  Amphetamine Head

  Another of my early film projects I called Amphetamine Head—A Study of Power in America. Since 1959 I had been studying a group of artists and bohemians known around the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village as “A-heads,” amphetamine heads. They shot up amphetamine and often stayed up on A for days and days. There were plentiful supplies of amphetamine, sold fairly cheaply in powder form, on the set.

  That fall I began filming Amphetamine Head. I decided to focus on the Ahead artists, mainly painters, but there were some poets and jazz musicians as well who could be put under the banner of A. Anyone who lived on the Lower East Side and spent much time mixing with the street culture encountered A-heads. They roamed the streets, bistros, and pads compulsively shooting, snorting, or gobbling unearthly amounts of amphetamine, methedrine, dysoxin, bennies, cocaine, procaine—all of them burning for the flash that would lead to FLASH! It was almost neo-Platonic, as beneath the galactic FLASH! were subsumed the demi-flashes all urging toward FLASH!