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

  The informant identified himself as James Rizzuto. He also contacted popular radio host Barry Gray. A five-page FBI memorandum dated November 25, 1963, stated, “Barry Gray, radio commentator, station WMCA, NYC, advised one James F. Rizzuto had alleged he had info re one Yves Leandez, a close associate of Lee H. Oswald. Rizzuto furnished following info to agents. Rizzuto states that he, Yves Leandes, Lee H. Oswald and possibly one Earl Perry served together in U.S. Marine Corps in nineteen fifty-six at Camp Le Jeune and Barstow, California.” The FBI memo continued, “Rizzuto described Leandes as a close personal friend of Oswald and both were professional agitators who attended meetings of the American Jewish Congress and other organizations and tried to disrupt meetings. Rizzuto stated he thought both Oswald and Leandes belonged to an organization possibly called ‘States Rights Party.’” The memo recommended that the bureau contact Rizzuto in person to check these allegations out.

  Two days later, November 27, another FBI memorandum, “Re Stephen Yves L’Eandes AKA Frenchy,” reported, “L’Eandes allegedly visited Russia with Lee Oswald and one Earl Perry in 1960s. L’Eandes was seen active in picketing the White House, heckling the American Jewish Congress, and other mass meetings of the integration movement.” The memo recommended that L’Eandes be identified posthaste and interviewed. The FBI interviewed Pat Padgett, wife of poet Ron Padgett, on November 25, at her place of employment at 11 Waverly Place in the Village, where L’Eandes once had lived.

  Al Fowler himself had attended some of the meetings at which L’Eandes had disrupted the events. He knew L’Eandes. “I liked him. He was amusing,” Fowler later told me. He had witnessed L’Eandes create a disturbance at a meeting of the Socialist Labor Party at the Militant Labor Forum on University Place, and he’d seen L’Eandes hanging out around the headquarters of the General Strike for Peace in early ’62, located at the Living Theater.

  Fowler later recalled the last time he had met with L’Eandes:The last conversation I had with L’Eandes prior to the big snuff took place in a diner on Sheridan Square. He talked then about Fair Play for Cuba, etc. His whole shuck was that he was a Cajun, and that his whole family, in the main, was around New Orleans. He even got into a dissertation on the French Quarter. He asked me how I felt about Cuba, and I told him just what you would expect I would tell anyone, and did. I told him Castro’s noble struggles against the giant of the North were of no more consequence to me than any other replacement of any government by more government.

  So in the heated horror of the postassassination turmoil, prodded by his close friend artist Ann Leggett, Al Fowler called the FBI, and he agreed to meet the FBI that evening at Stanley’s Bar! He did not show for the meeting, so FBI agents stood outside Stanley’s and queried those who entered the bar about Fowler and his whereabouts. I learned about this and became sorely alarmed!

  What if someone told the FBI that Fowler was crashing at my Secret Location? What about all the film cans with my footage for Amphetamine Head? What about the footage from the Great March on DC? What about the torrid footage of Szabo and Ellen B? What about the stacks of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts? What about my film equipment—camera, tripod, strips and cans of film everywhere, plus gaudy Jack Smith–esque hangings of colored cloths on the wall, with photofloods here and there attached to clip-ons? What would the FBI say about those if it raided the Secret Location?

  I raced over to the Secret Location a block away and left a note for Al on the metal bathtub cover in the kitchen, next to my mimeograph machine. I was preparing a new issue of Fuck You, and all the poems submitted for the new issue were in the Secret Location, including Ginsberg’s “The Change.” To me it was a tableau foretelling jail time if the FBI should raid my place looking for someone who claimed to have seen Lee Harvey Oswald in the Village!

  Here’s the note I left: “My dear Al—as a result of the FBI scene, you are requested to REMOVE all your stuff from here—If it is not removed by Friday, I shall repadlock the door and bolt the windows, and you will procure your stuff at my discretion. Ed. S.”

  Al left a note in reply, written on the reverse of my note, when he returned to the Secret Location. He pleaded with me to let his belongings remain in the pad, while promising to stay away.

  Then another note from poet Fowler: “Ed—as you can see, I’ve split. However—some of Ann’s stuff is on trunk. She especially prizes the goblets therein, so be gentle.

  “Thanks for all your help. Sympathy, & needed kick in the balls. Al”

  Next to the note on the porcelainized tub cover was a blood splotch, likely from his shooting up.

  A trio of historic documents that came about through the assassination of our president.

  By November 29 the FBI office in New York City sent out a notice that the investigation was to cease. It had learned by then that Rizzuto, the original source to radio host Barry Gray, and L’Eandes and Landesberg were one and the same! Steve Landesberg later became a well-known television comedian, starring on the Barney Miller sitcom. Why he claimed that Oswald had disrupted political meetings in Greenwich Village remains a mystery. (Fowler recalled seeing Landesberg some time later: “I ran into him a couple of years later. He had dropped the accent. He was wearing a nice suit. He came up to me on the street and offered me $600 to fly to Montreal and bring a box back with me, of unspecified contents.” Fowler turned down the offer.)

  The issue I published just days after the assassination, with Allen Ginsberg’s “The Change.”

  Meanwhile, once the coast seemed clear after Fowler had moved out, I went back to work on the December 1963 issue (volume 5, number 5) of Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts. The Secret Location was safe. My mimeo was safe. Ditto for the footage for Amphetamine Head—A Study of Power in America. The studio was not to be raided by the police for another year and a half.

  December ’63 was one of those dazed, nightmare months all too common in America after an almost totally not understood calamity occurs, such as the assault on a slowed-down limousine convoy in Dallas.

  The Arrival of 1964

  The New Year came while the nation was still stunned by the assassination. Miriam was pregnant with our daughter, Deirdre. I rented an apartment on East 204th Street off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. There was a good hospital nearby, and the pad was very clean. We would live there until our daughter was born in September, then a few months later move back to Manhattan. I kept the Secret Location on Avenue A.

  War, Always War—This One on Poverty

  In Lyndon Johnson’s first State of the Union Address on January 8 he announced that “this administration today, here and now declares unconditional War on Poverty. . . . We shall not rest until that war is won.”

  Of course, that was not the war at all. The war was the war when just weeks after JFK was in the ground much of the National Security Grouch Apparatus including the so-called liberals suffered hostile psyche squalls on the issue of Vietnam. (We had no idea at the time that Kennedy was set to pull all U.S. troops out of the Southeast Asia quagmire and no idea just then that Johnson was set to vastly increase U.S. involvement.)

  Meanwhile, the rising tide of expectation from the Kennedy years was still in place, and so a “war on poverty” seemed just another aspect of that tide.

  Belief in the Power of the Lower East Side and the Underground

  In the Lower East Side, where I kept my Secret Location on Avenue A for my mimeo work and films, I still felt a gritty determination for a time of “total assault on the culture.”

  The structure of the underground.

  “The Vancouver Report,” with hand-drawn stencil cover and printed on rose-colored Granitex paper.

  In February I published “The Vancouver Report” by Lower East Side poet Carol Bergé, which I had commissioned her to write. She had attended the Vancouver Poetry Conference the previous summer.

  I thought it was a well-written sixteen pages on a famous literary conference, especially fair to Charles Olson, the “father” of th
e various movements on hand, and to Allen Ginsberg, fresh from his vision of a new direction. She was a tad harsh on Robert Duncan, I thought, but all in all an interesting account.

  The Beatles in America

  Even those of us on the Lower East Side without a television set had to notice that something called The Beatles had come to town. New York DJs helped drum-beat the throng of 25,000 who shrieked hello to the group at JFK airport when the Fab Four arrived for The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS and two shows at Carnegie Hall.

  The Beatles were not about to be one-upped by the edgy New York press. At a press conference a reporter asked, “What do you do when you’re cooped up in your rooms between shows?” George replied, “We ice-skate.”

  I read that the group’s name had been inspired by Ginsberg, Kerouac, and crew. And that started me thinking about a blend of music and poetry. I couldn’t help but notice how The Beatles’ words were crystal clear! Intimately hearable! That would be my goal with The Fugs—that the words could at last star in the musical mix.

  My Final Term at NYU

  That spring I was completing my final term at NYU, taking a full course load. My favorite course was on Greek lyric poetry, taught by Dr. Bluma Trell, which opened the door for me to the great Sappho. Bluma Trell had a way of making Anacreon, Alcaeus, and, especially, Sappho and her complicated metrics come alive in my eager noggin! I was also translating Hesiod’s long poem, The Theogony, that year, hoping to publish it on my mimeograph.

  I was working weekends—Friday, Saturday, Sunday—on the 5:00 PM to 2:00 AM shift at the cigar store where I had toiled off and on, and learned a lot about the underground world of Times Square, since 1960. It was freaky. One evening a guy who worked at the 2-for-25¢ hamburger place next door came in for cigarettes. I asked him why he was barefoot. He replied, “I have a date with a Toe Queen, and my date likes dirty feet.”

  All that evening I wrote a series of poems depicting the life and times of “Tillie the Toe Queen” on white, elongated slats of thin cardboard from cigarette cartons. By the next weekend I had published The Toe-Queen Poems.

  When I read them at Le Metro, the response, in applause and overwhelming laughter, was the first I had received for anything I’d ever read in public, and I think it was an impetus to form a satiric proto-folk-rock group called The Fugs a few months later. One of the first Fugs songs, never, unfortunately, put on an album, was a ditty called “Toe Queen Love.”

  Hanging Out with Allen Ginsberg!

  One of the big events in early ’64 was that I began to hang out with Ginsberg. When I was first exploring New York City in 1958 and 1959, I never thought in a cycle of centuries that I’d ever become friends with such a hero.

  After the Vancouver Poetry Festival in the summer of ’63, Allen returned to San Francisco for a number of weeks, then flew to New York, where he stayed with his brother, Eugene, in Long Island, then visited his father and stepmother in New Jersey. By early 1964 he was staying with Ted Wilentz in the apartment above the 8th Street Bookshop. There was a lot of literary cross-pollination at the Wilentz salon, as when Ginsberg met Bob Dylan there early in ’64.

  The author at a Fugs show flashing a mudra Ginsberg had taught him in 1964. Ed Sanders collection.

  Then Allen and Peter Orlovsky located a three-room pad at 704 East Fifth Street, near Avenue C, on the sixth floor. It was just $35 a month—Hail to Thee, O Rent Control!

  I met Allen for the first time outside Gem Spa on St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue, a fine Beatnik meeting place that sold great chocolate egg creams for 15¢. We went out drinking at Stanley’s Bar one winter night, where the topic wended to visions, which he freely said he’d experienced.

  “Are you having visions right now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he nodded.

  Ah Sunflower, weary of time, I thought. I was drunk. I went with him to his new apartment. He patted the pillow, urging me to stay, but I decided not to make it with him.

  During those early months I went with him now and then to parties. There was one at photographer Robert Frank’s house, where Allen introduced me to his generation, including people such as Norman Podhoretz; Frank’s pretty wife, Mary, later a well-known painter; and poet John Hollander.

  Ginsberg taught me a number of mantrams, singing them to me (and many others) to the clack, clack, clink! of finger cymbals. He also turned me on to the Hare Krishna chant (which The Fugs recorded with Ginsberg and Gregory Corso a few years later). Plus, he taught me a number of mudras—special positioning of the hands and fingers—based on what he had learned in India. I memorized three mudras and used them in public performances.

  Roosevelt After Inauguration

  Within days of my meeting the bard, we began the first of many capers together. This was a satiric little book by William Burroughs called Roosevelt After Inauguration, which I published in January ’64 when the printer for the City Lights edition of The Yage Letters refused to publish it in late 1963. The book traces Burroughs’s 1953 trip to the Amazon rain forest in search of ayahuasca, or yagé, a hallucinogenic plant averred to confer telepathic skills on its user. The Yage Letters also has letters by Ginsberg from 1960 describing his own experiences taking yagé. In succeeding decades the book became quite valuable. Here is Allen’s cover, which I got him to hand-draw with a stylus directly on a stencil.

  Roosevelt After Inauguration—my first caper with Ginsberg, January 1964.

  Reading with Joel Oppenheimer at the Five Spot

  I met Joel Oppenheimer on the Lower East Side poetry scene and in places such as Stanley’s Bar on Avenue B and the Cedar Bar on University Place. He was a heavy drinker at the time, but almost always had a smile on his craggy face and a literary anecdote to share. He lived on the Lower East Side and had attended Black Mountain College in the 1950s. He was good friends with Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and Gilbert Sorrentino. I started publishing his poetry in Fuck You, and we became pals. Then Oppenheimer invited me to read with him on February 17, 1964, at the Five Spot! The Five Spot was located at 2 St. Mark’s Place, just off Third Avenue, and had featured geniuses such as Billy Holiday, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, and Or-nette Coleman. I was thrilled just to enter the front door!

  Joel’s and my reading were part of a series—on February 24, Robert Kelly and Fielding Dawson; on March 2, Barbara Guest and Charles Reznikoff; on March 9, Frank O’Hara and Arnold Weinstein; and, finally, on March 16, LeRoi Jones and Mack Thomas. I was nearly flabbergasted at the honor of reading alongside so many of the best minds of my generation.

  The afternoon of Sunday, March 8, 1964, I read at Diane di Prima’s “New York Poets Theater” as a benefit for the theater, with Julian Beck and Barbara Guest. The reading theme was “POLITICAL JUSTICE, readings from political writing of the past and present.” And wow! I was on the same bill as Julian Beck and Barbara Guest!

  I kept on reaching out to famous poets, trying to get submissions to my magazine. For instance, I exchanged a few letters with Edward Dahlberg, to no avail. The same was true with Marianne Moore, to whom I had sent a recent issue and a letter asking for poetry. On March 9, 1964, she sent a note back, on her letterhead, 260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn 5, New York:Thank you Mr. Sanders [which was typed, then the following handwritten:]

  Thank you. Magazine Something Coct You. [now typed] We writers can’t make what we say, too plain, natural, and simple [handwritten] Reverent

  [typed] My trouble is too much to do, too many letters that wish answers, not strength enough or a long enough day. Two oclock bedtime several days in succession isn’t good.

  Courage, we each must say?

  [signed] Marianne Moore

  Harvey Brown and Peace Eye

  I met a young man named Harvey Brown who hailed from Cleveland. He came from means—his grandfather had invented a crane for offloading river barges, and Harvey had inherited a large amount from his father’s estate. By 1964 Harvey Brown was an avid supporter of another of my heroes, Charles Olson,
and under Olson’s tutelage was starting Frontier Press and cashing in some of his inheritance to pay for it. He was married and had young children. In early 1964 he offered to publish a book of my poems. I was overjoyed.

  Olson had had almost as huge an impact on me—particularly The Maximus Poems and his manifesto “Projective Verse”—as Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, Poe, Blake, and Eliot. Olson dedicated The Maximus Poems to “Robert Creeley, the Figure of Outward.” I strived in my own modes to be “the Figure of Outward” to my own generation.

  So much of the early months of 1964 was divided among my full-time studies at NYU in Greek and Latin, my underground film work at the Secret Location, preparation of new issues of my magazine, and writing of an extended series of poems for the new book, which I decided to call Peace Eye. I was creating an extensive sho-sto-po (short story poem) called “The Gobble Gang Poems.”

  Crackdown on Coffeehouses and the Arts

  Meanwhile in the harsh U.S. climate after the shooting of JFK, there was a crackdown on the arts in, of all places, New York City! The post–World War II creativity revolution, which had thrived in New York City during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, ran into censorship by the fistful in 1963 and 1964.