by Just Kids
I brought Robert a little food. It was the first he had eaten since my return. I recounted my dealings with Scribner’s and Bard. We were amazed at how much had happened, retracing our small odyssey from calamitous to calm. Then he fell silent. I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t say he was sorry, but I knew he was. He wondered, as he rested his head on my shoulder, if I would have been better off if I hadn’t come back. But I did come back. In the end we were better off together.
I knew how to take care of him. I was good at tending the sick, bringing one out of fever, for I had learned that from my mother. I sat by his side as he drifted off to sleep. I was tired. My homecoming had taken a rough turn but things were working out and I wasn’t sorry at all. I was excited. I sat there listening to him breathe, the night-light spilling over his pillow. I felt the strength of community in the sleeping hotel. Two years before, he had rescued me, appearing out of the blue in Tompkins Square Park. Now I had rescued him. On that count we were even.
A few days later, I went to Clinton Street to settle up with Jimmy Washington, our former superintendent. I climbed the heavy stone steps one last time. I knew I was never coming back to Brooklyn. I stood outside his door for a moment getting ready to knock. I could hear “Devil in a Blue Dress” playing and Jimmy Washington talking to his lady. He opened the door slowly and was surprised to see me. He had packed up Robert’s things but it was obvious that he had taken a liking to most of mine. I had to laugh coming into his front room. My blue poker chips in their open inlay box, clipper ship with handmade sails, and garishly appointed plaster Infanta were carefully arranged on his mantel. My Mexican shawl was draped over the big wood desk chair I had laboriously sanded and painted over with white enamel. I called it my Jackson Pollock chair for it resembled a lawn chair I had seen in a photograph of the Pollock-Krasner farm in the Springs.
“I was keeping it all safe for you,” he said a bit sheepishly. “I couldn’t be sure you were coming back.” I just smiled. He fired up some coffee and we struck a bargain. I owed him three months’ rent: one hundred and eighty dollars. He could keep the sixty-dollar deposit and my stuff and we’d call it square. He had packed the books and records. I noticed Nashville Skyline on the top of the record pile. Robert had given it to me before I went to Paris and I had played “Lay Lady Lay” over and over. I gathered up my notebooks and found among them the copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel that Robert bought me when we first met. I felt a fleeting pang in my heart for I knew that innocent phase of our life had passed. I slipped an envelope with the black-and-white shots of Woman I that I had taken at the Modern into my pocket but left behind my failed attempts at painting her portrait, rolls of canvas splashed in umber, pinks, and green, souvenirs of a gone ambition. I was too curious about the future to look back.
As I was leaving, I noticed one of my drawings hanging on the wall. If Bard didn’t get it, at least Jimmy Washington did. I said goodbye to my stuff. It suited him and Brooklyn better. There’s always new stuff, that’s for sure.
Although I was grateful for the job, I returned reluctantly to Scribner’s. Being on my own in Paris had given me a taste of mobility and I had a difficult time readjusting. My friend Janet had moved to San Francisco, so I had lost my poet confidante.
Things eventually picked up when I made a new friend named Ann Powell. She had long brown hair, sad brown eyes, and a melancholy smile. Annie, as I called her, was also a poet, but with an American angle. She adored Frank O’Hara and gangster movies, and she would drag me to Brooklyn to see films with Paul Muni and John Garfield. We wrote daring B movie scripts and I’d play all the parts to amuse her on our lunch hour. Our spare time was consumed with scouring junk stores for just the right black turtleneck, the perfect white kid gloves.
Annie had gone to convent school in Brooklyn but loved Mayakovsky and George Raft. I was happy to have someone to talk to about poetry and crime as well as argue the merits of Robert Bresson versus Paul Schrader.
I cleared about seventy dollars a week at Scribner’s. After rent, the rest of the money went for food. I had to supplement our income, and looked into other ways to make a living besides punching a clock. I scoured secondhand stores for books to sell. I had a good eye, scouting rare children’s books and signed first editions for a few dollars and reselling them for much more. The turnover on a pristine copy of Love and Mr. Lewisham inscribed by H. G. Wells covered rent and subway fares for a week.
On one of my expeditions I found Robert a slightly used copy of Andy Warhol’s Index Book. He liked it but it also agitated him as he was designing a notebook with foldouts and pop-ups as well. The Index Book had photographs by Billy Name, who took the classic shots of the Warhol Factory. It included a pop-up castle, a red accordion that squeaked, a pop-up biplane, and a hairy-torsoed dodecahedron. Robert felt he and Andy were on parallel paths. “It’s good,” he said. “But mine will be better.” He was impatient to get up and work. “I can’t just lie here,” he said. “The whole world is leaving me behind.”
Robert was restless but obliged to stay in bed, as his impacted wisdom teeth could not be extracted until the infection and fever abated. He hated being sick. He would get up too fast and relapse. He didn’t have the nineteenth-century view of convalescence that I had, savoring the opportunity of being bedridden to read books or pen long, feverish poems.
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to wind up there. We could have had a fair-sized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
It took a while, but as Robert got stronger and more fully recovered, he thrived in Manhattan as I had toughened in Paris. He soon hit the streets looking for work. We both knew he could not function holding a steady job, but he took on any odd employment he could get. His most hated job was carting art to and from galleries. It irked him to labor on behalf of artists he felt to be inferior, but he was paid in cash. We put every extra cent in the back of a drawer to go toward our immediate goal—a larger room. It was the main reason we were so diligent paying our rent.
Once you secured your room at the Chelsea, you weren’t immediately kicked out if you got behind on the rent. But you did become part of the legion hiding from Mr. Bard. We wanted to establish ourselves as good tenants since we were on a waiting list for a bigger room on the second floor. I had seen my mother closing all the venetian blinds on many a sunny day, hiding from loan sharks and bill collectors throughout my childhood, and I had no desire to cower in the face of Stanley Bard. Mostly everybody owed Bard something. We owed him nothing.
We dwelled in our little room as inmates in a hospitable prison. The single bed was good for sleeping close, but Robert had no space to work and neither did I.
The first friend Robert made at the Chelsea was an independent fashion designer named Bruce Rudow. He had been in the Warhol film The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and had a cameo in Midnight Cowboy. He was small and light-footed with an uncanny resemblance to Brian Jones. There were circles beneath his pale eyes, shaded by a black wide-brimmed cordovan hat like Jimi Hendrix wore. He had silky strawberry blond hair that fell over his high cheekbones and a wide smile. The Brian Jones connection would have been enough for me, but he also possessed a sweet and generous disposition. He was mildly flirtatious but nothing passed between him and Robert. It was part of his affable nature.
He came to visit us but there was nowhere to sit so he invited us down to his place. He had a spacious working area strewn with hides, snakeskin, lambskin, and red leather cuttings. Tissue sewing patterns were laid out on long worktables and the walls were lined with racks of finished pieces. He had his own small factory. Bruce designed black leather jackets with silver fringe, beautifully made and featured in Vogue magazi
ne.
Bruce took Robert under his wing, giving him welcome encouragement. They were both resourceful and inspired one another. Robert was intrigued with merging art and fashion and Bruce gave him advice on ways to break into the fashion world. He offered him an area in his workspace. Though grateful, Robert was not content to work in someone else’s environment.
Possibly the most influential person we met at the Chelsea was Sandy Daley. She was a warm and somewhat reclusive artist who lived next to us in room 1019. It was a completely white room; even the floors were white. We had to take off our shoes before we entered. Silver helium pillows from the original Factory drifted and suspended above us. I had never seen such a place. We sat barefoot on the white floor and drank coffee and looked at her photography books. Sandy sometimes seemed a dark captive in her white room. She often wore a long black dress and I liked to walk behind her so as to observe her hem trailing the hallway and the staircase.
Sandy had spent much time working in England, the London of Mary Quant, plastic raincoats, and Syd Barrett. She had long nails and I marveled at her technique of lifting the arm of the record player so as to not damage her manicure. She took simple, elegant photographs and always had a Polaroid camera on hand. It was Sandy who lent Robert his first Polaroid camera and served as a valued critic and confidante in critiquing his earliest photographs. Sandy was supportive to both of us and was able to ride, without judgment, the transitions Robert went through as a man and an artist.
Her environment suited Robert more than me, but it was a nice respite from the clutter of our tiny room. If I needed a shower or just wanted to daydream in an atmosphere of light and space, her door was always open. I often sat on the floor next to my favorite object, a large bowl of hammered silver resembling a glowing hubcap with a single gardenia swimming in its center. I would listen to Beggars Banquet over and over while its fragrance permeated the all but empty room.
I also befriended a musician named Matthew Reich. His living space was totally utilitarian, with nothing of his own except an acoustic guitar and a black-and-white composition book containing his lyrics and disjointed observations written with inhuman velocity. He was wiry and obviously obsessed with Bob Dylan. Everything about him—his hair, dress, and demeanor—reflected the style of Bringing It All Back Home. He had married the actress Geneviève Waïte in an apparent whirlwind courtship. She quickly realized Matthew was intelligent though somewhat unhinged, and not a relative of Bob Dylan. She ran off with Papa John from the Mamas and the Papas and left Matthew prowling the halls of the hotel dressed in a snap tab-collar shirt and pegged pants.
Although he mirrored Bob Dylan, there still wasn’t anyone like Matthew. Robert and I were fond of him but Robert could only take him in small doses. Matthew was the first musician I met in New York. I could relate to his Dylan fixation, and as he put together a song, I saw possibilities in shaping my own poems into songs.
I never knew whether his speedy speech patterns reflected amphetamine use or an amphetamine mind. He would often lead me up blind alleys or through an endless labyrinth of incomprehensible logic. I felt like Alice with the Mad Hatter, negotiating jokes without punch lines, and having to retrace my steps on the chessboard floor back to the logic of my own peculiar universe.
Robert’s Hands
I had to work long hours to make up for the advance I got at Scribner’s. After a time, I got a promotion and started work even earlier, waking at six and walking to Sixth Avenue to get the F train to Rockefeller Center. The subway fare was twenty cents. At seven I opened the safe, filled the registers, and got things ready for the day ahead, platooning duties with the head cashier. I was making a little more money but I preferred having my own section and ordering books. I finished work at seven and usually walked home.
Robert would greet me, impatient to show me something he was working on. One evening, having read my notebook, he designed a totem for Brian Jones. It was shaped like an arrow, with rabbit hair for the White Rabbit, a line from Winnie the Pooh, and a locket-sized portrait of Brian. We finished it together and hung it over our bed.
“Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world.
Robert finally was able to have his impacted wisdom teeth extracted. He felt bad for a few days but was also relieved. Robert was sturdy but he was prone to infection, so I followed him around with warm salt water to keep the sockets clean. He rinsed but pretended to be annoyed. “Patti,” he said, “you’re like a Ben Casey mermaid with the salt-water treatments.”
Harry, often at our heels, agreed with me. He pointed out the importance of salt in alchemical experiments and then immediately suspected I was up to something supernatural.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m going to turn his fillings into gold.”
Laughter. An essential ingredient for survival. And we laughed a lot.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
The moon was on the cover of Life magazine, but the headlines of every newspaper were emblazoned with the brutal murders of Sharon Tate and her companions. The Manson murders didn’t gel with any film noir vision I had of crime, but it was the kind of news that sparked the imagination of the hotel inhabitants. Nearly everyone was obsessed with Charles Manson. At first Robert went over every detail with Harry and Peggy, but I couldn’t bear talking about it. The last moments of Sharon Tate haunted me, imagining her horror knowing that they were about to slaughter her unborn child. I retreated into my poems, scrawling in an orange composition book. Envisioning Brian Jones floating facedown in a swimming pool was as much tragedy as I could handle.
Robert had a fascination with human behavior, in what drove seemingly normal people to create mayhem. He kept up with the Manson news but his curiosity waned as Manson’s behavior grew more bizarre. When Matthew showed Robert a newspaper picture of Manson with an X carved on his forehead, Robert lifted the X, using the symbol in a drawing.
“The X interests me, but not Manson,” he said to Matthew. “He’s insane. Insanity doesn’t interest me.”
A week or two later I waltzed into the El Quixote looking for Harry and Peggy. It was a bar-restaurant adjacent to the hotel, connected to the lobby by its own door, which made it feel like our bar, as it had been for decades. Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, Eugene O’Neill, and Thomas Wolfe were among those who had raised one too many a glass there.
I was wearing a long rayon navy dress with white polka dots and a straw hat, my East of Eden outfit. At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde. There were musicians everywhere, sitting before tables laid with mounds of shrimp with green sauce, paella, pitchers of sangria, and bottles of tequila.
I stood there amazed, yet I didn’t feel like an intruder. The Chelsea was my home and the El Quixote my bar. There were no security guards, no pervasive sense of privilege. They were here for the Woodstock festival, but I was so afflicted by hotel oblivion that I wasn’t aware of the festival or what it meant.
Grace Slick got up and brushed past me. She was wearing a floor-length tie-dyed dress and had dark violet eyes like Liz Taylor.
“Hello,” I said, noticing I was taller.
“Hello yourself,” she said.
When I went back upstairs I felt an inexplicable sense of kinship with these people, though I had no way to interpret my feeling of prescience. I could never have predicted that I would one day walk in their path. At that moment I was st
ill a gangly twenty-two-year-old book clerk, struggling simultaneously with several unfinished poems.
On that night, too excited to sleep, infinite possibilities seemed to swirl above me. I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place.
The mandala of my life.
Mr. Bard returned the ransom. I unlocked our door and saw our portfolios leaning against the wall, the black with black ribbons, the red with gray ribbons. I untied them both and carefully looked at each drawing. I couldn’t be sure if Bard had even looked at the work. Certainly if he had, he didn’t see it with my eyes. Each drawing, each collage, reaffirmed my faith in our ability. The work was good. We deserved to be here.
Robert was frustrated that Bard didn’t accept our art as recompense. He was anxious about how we’d get by since that afternoon both his moving jobs were canceled. He lay on the bed with his white T-shirt, dungarees, and huaraches, looking very much like the day we met. But when he opened his eyes to look at me he did not smile. We were like fishermen throwing out our nets. The net was strong but often we returned from ventures empty-handed. I figured we had to step up the action and find someone who would invest in Robert. Like Michelangelo, Robert just needed his own version of a pope. With so many influential people passing through the doors of the Chelsea, it was conceivable we could one day secure him a patron. Life at the Chelsea was an open market, everyone with something of himself to sell.
In the meantime we agreed to forget our cares for the night. We took a little money from our savings and walked to Forty-second Street. We stopped at a photo booth in Playland to take our pictures, a strip of four shots for a quarter. We got a hot dog and papaya drink at Benedict’s, then merged with the action. Boys on shore leave, prostitutes, runaways, abused tourists, and assorted victims of alien abduction. It was an urban boardwalk with Kino parlors, souvenir stands, Cuban diners, strip clubs, and late-night pawnshops. For fifty cents one could slip inside a theater draped in stained velvet and watch foreign films paired with soft porn.