by Sanders, Ed
Everybody from Washington Square to Tompkins Square called the streets “the set”—“I’ve been looking for you all over the set, man. Where’s my amphetamine?” With a generation of folks readily present who viewed their lives as taking place on a set, there was no need to hunt afar for actors and actresses. What a cast of characters roamed the Village streets of 1963!
I’d heard rumors about a doctor giving President Kennedy shots. Uppers. It turned out, years later, that the rumors had had a basis in truth. So there was plenty of gossip at the time that the president used amphetamine and that his doctors injected him every morning. There were further speculations that the generals who met in the Pentagon war room every day planning atomic snuffs were a bit A-bombed themselves.
I was fascinated with an amph-artist named Jim Kolb, who once had stayed a few days at one of my pads. I had known him since 1960. I had observed the violence of the amphetamine heads and the raw power grabs that occurred in their glassy-eyed universe after a few months of sleeping just twice a week. If generals, corporate executives, presidents, premiers, and others were users of A, what were the implications? What if A-heads had taken over the governments of the world?
It was also commonly accepted on the set that the Germans had invented amphetamine and that the Nazis had shot up amphetamine during campaigns in North Africa in World War II, inspiring tales on the Lower East Side of futuristic battles involving fierce-breathed amphetamine humanoids, babbling shrilly like rewinding tapes, in frays of total blood. Another commonly accepted thesis was that amphetamine temporarily raised the intelligence of the user. The heads also seemed proud that A-use destroyed brain cells. One of the A-heads might shout, “I lose trillions of cells every day, man, grooo-VY!”
Amphetamine altered sex. Some under A’s spell waxed unable in eros or sublimated their desire beneath a frenzy of endless conversation or art projects. Others with strong natural urges experienced this: that the erogenous areas became extended under A to include every inch of bodily skin. Men could not easily come, and women loved it forever. The image of amphetamine-driven Paolos and Francescas writhing for hours on a tattered mattress was humorous but true.
I became aware that some of the A-heads were talented artists. One of the problems was the high destruction ratio of their art. Most of it was abandoned or lost in the endless succession of evictions from apartments. When they first occupied a new pad, they sometimes proceeded to turn every surface and every room into an “environment” of murals, painting, and sculptured piles of furniture and debris brought in from the street. A landlord, once observing that the entire pad had been turned into art, so to speak, would throw up his arms in alarm and head for eviction court or the local police precinct.
Accordingly, during that fall of American desolation, I decided to make a film about power, using the world of the A-heads as archetype, lugging along my Wollensak tape recorder into a previously prepared apartment, and filming and taping shoot-ups, fights, conversations. I also wanted to trace what I was certain these A-head artists would do to the apartment: adorn its walls.
My friend Szabo knew of an apartment at 28 Allen Street that was empty. I went to a dealer in A on the Lower East Side who charged $30 for four ounces of pure powdered amphetamine, a fantastic bargain. I told him about my idea to hold an A-head “Cabinet Meeting” and perhaps re-create a presidential press conference. He was excited: “Let me see the film when you get it done, please!”
I brought the A to the apartment in a brown paper bag and just left it on the kitchen table. I dispatched Szabo to wander around the set telling people about the apartment with free amphetamine down on Allen Street. All visitors had to do was let me film. The result gave insight into the finding of gold in Sutter’s Creek. Within minutes the A-heads began to flock, and the sound of a trilling flute was heard in the hallway of 28 Allen Street, ’phet-freaks banging most urgently on the door.
I had brought with me about ten clip-on light fixtures and a bunch of three-hundred-watt photoflood lamps, which I clipped to the walls of the apartment so that any area could be lit up for filming. I then checked the illumination on the walls, feeling them to be most important for filming the construction of wall murals and collages. I surrounded the mattress with lights and attached one in the kitchen, too. I switched on the lights and filmed the clean, neatly arranged apartment.
I had been worried that when I first switched on the floodlights and began to film, people would get uptight. But nothing happened. The group just accepted the extra light and the camera as another tidbit of grooviness. That is, the babblers kept babbling, the painters kept painting, and the flautists kept fluting.
During the two days of filming several poetic luminaries showed up who had heard about it. Among them were poets Joel Oppenheimer and Gregory Corso, who brought with him his freshly married and pregnant wife from Shaker Heights, Ohio, Sally November Corso.
Meanwhile, I scurried from room to room, shutting lights on and off, shooting the shoots, changing the location of the microphone, changing tapes, changing film. For film changes I had sewn together two dark cloths into a large sack, inside which I could crouch in darkness to change film. I didn’t want to take any chances with the “government-surplus” film with respect to accidental exposure of the photosensitive surfaces.
Among the participants was a young woman named Diane. She was around sixteen—sitting with the others on the mattress and floor of the bedroom, yakkety-yakking. Amphetamine had possessed her. She wore her long black tresses swept back into a vague tangled knot. Her eyes were huge and dark—capable of fixing a baleful glazed gaze on a partner of shoot-up, art, or grope. She wore a black short-sleeved scoop-neck body stocking. Her shoes and other clothes were in a brown bag on the window ledge between the rooms.
Diane drew eyelashes with ink and brush above her lips so that her mouth babbling torrentially had the look of a convulsing Cyclops. Next, her twitching Rapidograph pen began to work on her toe. She drew flower petals around the shoot-up sore. Then she ripped at the toe hole and peeled the stocking up to her thigh and spent the next hour drawing a maze of stick figures all over the leg. Soon she had cut a jagged circle out of the stomach of the body stocking with a razor blade. She studied her stomach, craning her head down, and then began to shave each pale stomach hair with the blade. Sometimes a meth minispasm would occur and the steel would nick the skin, leaving a thin red slice. Ouch. Then Diane sat back on the mattress and grabbed a notebook. “I’m going to jot some thoughts.”
She wrote for several minutes, then picked up the single-edged razor blade again and started scraping her lips with it. I was busy at this time filming other people’s shoot-ups. I glanced over at Diane and winced involuntarily, seeing her scraping her mouth. When little edges of lip skin were hooked up, she would pick the skin with pinching fingers and tear it off. Soon long blood-pink strips had been peeled from her lips. I found it hard to photograph the event, so unnerving was it to see and to hear the scritch-scratching of the razor.
Diane looked up at a fellow A-head and opened her stripped lips, “Hey, why don’t you shoot me up? I could dig it.” The guy was all too eager to accommodate her and leaped for the glass of needles. He filtered a solution of dope and filled to the brim an eyedropper with needle affixed. With a flourish he stuck the needle into a blue-gray vein on the underside of Diane’s forearm. Jabbed would have been a better word. He slid the needle long inside the vein much farther than necessary. Then as he injected the dope, he shoved the needle to the hilt inside her and began to twist slightly so that the needle tip pushed up against the top of the vein from inside. The viewers could see the skin rise from the jabbing needle, like a mole burrowing across a putting green. It had to be painful.
I switched off the camera because I wasn’t sure whether she was going into a “masochist riff” for the sake of the camera.
The pain didn’t seem to bother her for long because she was soon writing in her notebooks. “I want to describe my fi
rst ice cream cone . . .” she began, jotting quickly.
I filmed a fight that would later comprise a vignette dubbed “The Glue-Bottle Violence Scene.” It started calmly enough, with two A-heads working on art projects. The problem was that there was just one glue bottle and the bottle was just about empty. Surly waxed the two glue-needers as each tried to hook out some glue at the same time.
“Watch it, motherfucker!” one of them growled. At that he grabbed the glue bottle and smeared the entire contents on the portion of plywood on which he was laboring. This caused the freak scene immortalized in the film.
It could have gotten worse, but others intervened and a cut-up was averted.
Later in the year after being in an altercation and getting stabbed, key A-artist Jim Kolb was delivered, according to the tale, doa to the hospital. Just as he was being declared dead by the doctor in the emergency room and the sheet was about to be pulled over his face, a miracle occurred. His “body” suffered an amphetamine twitch-spasm, and he revived. When the doctor noticed the dope twitch, he rushed Kolb into surgery, and he was saved. This story was told and retold like some sort of religious parable.
I had great footage of arabesques and panels of micro-swirls, a woman standing on a chair drawing the minutiae of eternity on the wall. Someone removed a section of pipe leading to the radiator and drilled holes to make a flute.
I decided to sleep because I was very tired and had abstained from ingesting the white. I was the only one copping z’s in the entire pad as the others raved and painted onward. As I drifted toward sleep, I overheard a conversation between Szabo and young Diane. Szabo wanted to borrow her blade so that he could cut a hatchway into her body stocking in order for them to make it. He apparently cut a successful passageway, for soon the groans and sighs were floating above the babble in the dark room. Others joined them, writhing in insatiable A-sex.
In terms of power Jim K began to take over the pad. He ruled with the irrationality and violence of a textbook dictator. Then the amphetamine supply dipped toward zero, and people were getting grumpy and demanding more as they came down. I filmed. And filmed. And filmed. By the weekend, after a couple of days of filming, I had to go to work at the cigar store, so I abandoned the set on Allen Street. Several days later I returned to the Allen Street pad to take some shots of the pad’s “final state.” Its condition was that of bombed-out chaos. Then I carried my shot rolls of film back to the Secret Location on Avenue A.
Poet Bill Szabo around the time of the filming of Amphetamine Head. Ink drawing by Ann Leggett.
Sound Track for Amphetamine Head
I sent the film off to be developed, thanks to Jonas Mekas. I also created a sound track for the opening credits. To get a hollow sound effect, I put my head under a pillow, holding the tape recorder microphone close, intoning, “Am Am Am Am Phet Phet Phet Phet ta ta ta ta mine mine mine Head Head Head Head!” (The tape is in my archive to this day.) My idea for the opening credits was to have hypodermic needles filled with colored inks squirting the letters onto canvas, Amphetamine Head—A Study of Power in America.
White House Cooperation with Seven Days in May
Meanwhile, the march toward assassination kept up its relentless step.
JFK himself urged director John Frankenheimer to make a movie of the political thriller Seven Days in May, “to the dismay of the Pentagon,” as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in his book on Robert Kennedy. Seven Days told of a military takeover in 1974 against a young president who was making a disarmament treaty with the Soviets. The movie starred Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, and Fredric March, with a script by Rod Serling, the author of the Twilight Zone TV series. Filming was completed in the days before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas.
In mid-November Look magazine, with a circulation of more than 7 million, published an article recounting how the Pentagon had grrred “no” to requests by the director for a visit to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff while at the same time the president had allowed Frankenheimer and crew to tour the White House and to film the entranceways. They were also allowed to film a mock riot between pro-president and pro-coup partisans outside the White House July 27, ironically very near the day the Test Ban Treaty was inked in Moscow, pending Senate approval.
After Kennedy had read Seven Days in May, he commented to a friend that a military coup in the United States was possible under certain circumstances, “but it won’t happen on my watch.”
Bye Bye, Nam
In his book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, key aide Kenneth O’Donnell said that the president had told Senator Mike Mansfield in the spring of ’63 that he would order all troops out of Vietnam in 1965. “But I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m reelected.”
A Trip to Texas
There was considerable anger at JFK in the South because of administration enforcement of integration, plus, among some, because of his liberal image. In an attempt to “take his case to the people,” he had chosen to go to Texas and to Florida to dazzle them with his “Ich bin ein Berliner” pizzazz. Florida had gone for Richard Nixon, and apparently only having Lyndon Johnson on the ticket had won Kennedy Texas.
The president flew to Texas on November 21, first to Houston, where Camelot got huge ovations, then on to Ft. Worth for more palm thunder. Then on November 22, he landed at Love Field in Dallas with his wife, Jackie.
Waiting for JFK that morning was a welcoming ad in the Dallas Morning News with a sequence of rightist moans:WHY have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership.
WHY are you in favor of the U.S. continuing to give economic aid to Argentina, in spite of the fact that Argentina has just seized almost 400 Million Dollars of American private property?
“You know,” the president joked to Jackie as he scanned the ad that morning in their hotel room, “we’re heading into nut country today.” In the speech he was on his way to make, JFK was going to chastise right-wing conservatives.
The Final Procession
Trapped in a hostile city where the lunchmeat necks had so recently spat on the UN ambassador, the man of Camelot wended to his doom. The Secret Service had allowed open windows in upper stories, for instance, the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. And it did seem odd that immediately in front of JFK’s limousine as the shots were being fired, a man raised his umbrella aloft as if to say, “Now!” (from frame Z-227 of the Zapruder film).
Then the Assassination
I was coming out of class at New York University just after noon. I tried to make a call. The phone was dead. People were crowded around taxis in the street, listening to the radio. Thus came word of the assassination. I was right in the midst of publishing a new issue of my magazine, buoyed by receiving a fresh and brilliant poem by my hero Allen Ginsberg.
How could I possibly have become involved with the peripheries of the Kennedy assassination? Here’s how. I thought Lee Harvey Oswald at first glance was a horrid nut. Then came the rumors that Oswald had been in the Village, disrupting civil rights meetings, and my friend Al Fowler claimed that he had attended some of the same meetings.
Earlier in the fall of ’63 Al Fowler had spent some time in his hometown, Albany, working on a manuscript of his poetry to give to Auerhahn Press, a project that never quite came to fruition. Then he returned to the Lower East Side, and I was allowing him to crash for a few days at the Secret Location in the back building on Avenue A.
I was still convinced he would become a top-rank American poet. I would read his notebooks and pull out poems to publish in Fuck You. After his visit home it wasn’t clear whether he was shooting junk or not, but I still could not turn him away from the Secret Location. Now and then Al would don the priest’s collar and a gnarly silver cross of the small Catholic sect of which he was an adherent. To me he was a poetic wonder.
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Oswald in the Village?
The first issue of the Village Voice after the assassination came out on November 28. On the front page was an article headlined “Was Oswald in Village?”:The FBI was in Greenwich Village early this week in search of clues to Lee H. Oswald’s past. Their investigation here is apparently based on information that the alleged assassin of President Kennedy had for a time associated with a youthful Mississippi-born rightist who disrupted a number of pro-integration meetings in the Village during 1961 and 1962. The information came from an East Villager who claims he knew both Oswald and the rightist slightly while all three were in the same Marine outfit. He says he saw the two men together on more than one occasion and claims that Oswald had taken photographs for the Southerner in the course of disrupting one meeting. The informant claims that the photographs were destined for a pro-fascist publication. There had been no information, prior to this disclosure, that Oswald had been in New York for more than one night since his return from Russia in 1962.