It was the same concept as the paper dress that I had worn on the airplane to Israel less than ten years earlier, but it was of heavier paper, coated, and it had a zipper up the front. The only problem with that jumpsuit was the same problem as with all jumpsuits, you had to unzip it to the crotch and basically get undressed before you could pee. But I loved that jumpsuit. I wore it all over London until some people popped out of a shop and I was asked to be a hair model for a show at Vidal Sassoon.
For days the stylists worked on me. They dyed my hair purple and then permed half of it to look like a bunch of grapes. I was told to arrive at a certain day and time at the Royal Albert Hall, where me and other girls who had also had their hair cut and dyed to resemble fruits were placed under a giant sheet with only our heads sticking out and then we were pushed out onto the stage. “You are a fruit basket!” we were told. In the audience were three thousand hairdressers from Japan. I was a model for Vidal Sassoon! With purple hair shaved on one side and permed on the other and my black spike-heeled boots and my jumpsuit or bandaged jeans I was punk, but I did not know other punks as I wandered around London and then Paris.
In those days London was quite a different city; even though it was the seventies you still felt it had not quite gotten over the war; it was so provincial compared to the United States and particularly New York City. The pubs opened only from noon to two and then from seven till eleven, some peculiar hours like that; after eleven, if you wanted to drink you had to be a member of a private club—I wasn’t a member, but the frequenters of the Queen’s Elm belonged to the Factotum Club and took me with them.
The shops were closed on Sundays and there were few buses and the tubes stopped early. The people lined up politely to get on the buses and there was not much traffic, even on Oxford Street. The only breakfasts you could get were at these horrible cafés with bad coffee and beans on toast, an item that to this day does not, to me, belong at breakfast. In fact, beans on toast doesn’t belong at any time.
There weren’t malls and giant supermarkets with nice food. The city was gray and grimy and bleak and years behind New York City (aside from the fashion-forward underground). There were a few Indian takeaways, and Soho had Chinese restaurants. Soho was a rough area with a sex trade, I guess, though it did not seem threatening to me, not after New York City, where the rough and dangerous areas were a million times worse.
Homosexuality was illegal. Men could be arrested for dancing together. The drug addicts gathered in Piccadilly Circus and everything was covered with pigeon droppings and television had limited hours of programming and only a couple of stations.
There were shows like Angels—which took place in some then-rough part of London, like Islington. The “Angels” were the nurses who worked in the hardcore hospital there, but it was slow—so slow, it was slower than the slowest U.S. soap opera, and I couldn’t believe people could watch this show where there was no action and no drama and even the most plebeian statement took forever for a character to utter.
The tubes stopped running by eleven, and after the party at Andrew Logan’s I would have been stuck out there. Maybe I stayed until 6 A.M., when the trains started running again. Maybe somebody gave me a lift back to Catford or Deptford or wherever I was living at that time; I moved college dorms a lot.
Some time later Andrew Logan’s factory-loft burned down with all those great things from Biba inside. I wished I had one of the large hamburger cloth sculptures, or the golden palm tree. Even photographs of the loft would be great, but this was before people took snapshots of everything all the time. And I did not have a camera.
OH, THE STUFF I DID THAT YEAR, age nineteen. In Paris I was stopped all the time and told I was “mignon,” which, with my bad French, took me a while to learn meant “cute.” My French was so bad, I thought they kept stopping to tell me about a steak. Most of the men who followed me were very aggressive Algerians. It was some kind of aggressive Algerian period in history. Other times, though, I did meet quite interesting people, like an artist who had me over to his loft to show me what he was working on. He had a bunch of mirrors on the floor and a lot of lemons, which were getting old. His concept was light-years ahead of mainstream art of the time.
So was my opinion of his work.
Other times, I would be invited to parties or asked if I would consent to be photographed or have my portrait painted, or go to a restaurant or club. I was ready for adventure. It came to me.
EVENTUALLY, I HEARD BACK from Lawrence Durrell. He had been out of town and was surprised to learn that I had made a trek to see him. Now he asked me to come there, officially, at a time when he was around.
I went back to the town near Aix-en-Provence and I did stay with Lawrence Durrell. He was sixty-three at the time.
THAT IS A HUGE AGE GAP! I want to say something about sleeping with an old person when you are young. All these old guys who have young wives and think it’s because they are so youthful or youthful at heart? It’s not. They are either famous or rich. Old guy, you might not think you are old, but you are. To a young person, your skin feels dry and flabby and you smell kind of stale. You get to feel and imagine you are young by sleeping with a younger person with silky skin and sweet breath. (Even a young stinky person is different from an old stinky person.) Old guys can trade in their wives for newer models, but you rarely see old women with younger guys. If it happens, they sure make fun of the situation, like when Liz Taylor had a younger husband who was in construction.
It’s creepy and scary if you can imagine being with someone old enough to be your grandfather. Though, come to think of it, I am close to the same age now that Larry was then.
It wasn’t his fault. I was just some crazed young woman who wanted to be a writer. I was going to go down to the south of France and absorb the skill or craft or whatever from him. At that time Larry was globally famous. He was a rich and famous successful literary writer of world renown. The Alexandria Quartet was highly critically acclaimed and published in just about every language. In fact, he had done so well that we tooled around in a fancy little van his publishers had sent him as a gift!
He lived in a big French house—not a château, by any means, but a large, grand French house with a walled garden. Inside was quite vast; there was a huge bathroom he called “Hollywood” because he had had it redone and it was all glossy red tile and gold and I forget what else. A big kitchen, a greenhouse room, upstairs his study, bedrooms . . . in the garden was a bust of his last wife, who had died of cancer. There was one daughter, about my age, who lived in London, from another marriage.
The first night he took me to the Auberge aux Cochons Rouges and the food was fabulous. After the amazing French dinner, we went back to his house, and believe me there was plenty to drink. I did not know it, but he was pretty much drinking all day long, so I was shown to a bedroom. At 3 A.M. I woke up and there was a presence in the room with me, a presence so strong it actually woke me up. I did not feel frightened; it wasn’t a malevolent spirit or anything like that.
At breakfast I said to Larry, “Gee, did somebody die in that room?”
He said, “Do you mean my wife? No, why?”
And I said, “You know, a . . . presence woke me up.”
“Was it at three A.M.?” he asked.
I said, “Yes, but it wasn’t malevolent.”
Apparently a number of other people had slept in that room and the same thing had happened to them.
There were croissants and coffee for breakfast. A couple of hours later he broke out the little mini pizza tarts from the deli—they were delicious—and he offered me a drink. I forget what it was, but he said it was known as “elevenses,” which is when we started drinking. I figured it was normal.
He told me lots of anecdotes: all about Henry Miller, who had been his good friend—they lived opposite one another on the square of some village. In his opinion, Miller stopped writing novels after he began answering people’s letters, and he would write these ten-t
housand-word letters, which used up all the words in his head.
Larry had stories about T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, and how T.S. followed Marianne Moore out someplace and when she came back her cheeks were bright pink and they had “done it together.”
We drove around the streets, windy and dangerous and at that time of year, deserted. We visited his future gravesite, which he came to look at quite a lot. He had people over one night; he asked me across the hall to his room . . .
A day or so later he gave me a wad of cash—because he knew I was broke, it wasn’t like he was paying me, or paying me off, or anything—and I got on a train to Paris, where I stayed in a small hotel on the Left Bank he had booked. I went to the places he had instructed me to see.
In the morning I arrived by nine at La Coupole and, as instructed, took a seat in the back facing the door. It was pretty empty as I ordered a croissant and café au lait. Sure enough, in came Samuel Beckett, shabby and hawk nosed, sliding into his usual table. A while later Simone de Beauvoir, also facing my direction only a few rows nearer the door than Beckett, took a seat in her massive ratty fur, reading the paper and eating croissants and from time to time looking at me with a certain . . . puzzlement, maybe. And finally, Jean-Paul Sartre. I couldn’t believe it. There I was at La Coupole having breakfast next to one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, one of the greatest playwrights, one of the great literary figures—and nobody else was in the place! And they weren’t even speaking to one another. How could this be happening? Could you crowd a room with this kind of brilliance and ever get over it in your whole life?
I wanted to grab life and run with it and be fearless and have adventures and see the world.
new york city, 1977
Back in New York a year later, during my senior year, Studio 54 opened and I went with some others from Barnard and Columbia. Outside was a mob scene, crowds pushing and shoving to get in. I don’t want to go in if these are what the people are like outside, I thought. I mean, if you couldn’t stand the people on the street, why would you want to be trapped indoors with them?
So I did not go to the opening night, but I did go the next night and a few other times. This was the first time in New York when people gathered around the entrance to a club waiting to be given permission to come in. You went in and it was kind of shabby. There was a long mirrored hallway like an old movie theater (the place had been a television broadcasting studio), then a coat check to one side, and off to the other side were circular bars with very sweaty half-naked bartenders. There was always someone giving you a “free drink ticket.” I don’t remember ever having to buy a drink there. All the half-naked bartenders were very young, and for many people getting in that club meant entering an oasis of acceptance, something hard to understand now.
I never really liked it. It was so dark, so noisy, and you couldn’t see or hear, although there was a giant neon or illuminated moon sculpture that would come down from the ceiling from time to time. This moon was a silhouette of the Man in the Moon holding a coke spoon up to his nose, and the lights would twinkle, indicating the Man in the Moon was inhaling. Then everyone who was dancing screamed. Disco music played over loudspeakers. I remember it as being things by Donna Summer and “The Hustle” and sometimes live acts were up in front—the Village People?—or others who lip-synced to their hits.
You didn’t need anybody to dance with, you just got out there and writhed in various lighting conditions, strobe light for a minute or two, then disco ball lighting. Sometimes flurries of snow (soap powder, I don’t know) would come down, and you had to be careful when you were dancing because you might slip or somebody could suddenly shove a popper up your nose. I am not sure what these things were. I mean, I know they’re amyl nitrate, but if someone stuck this under your nose you got a blast like you had just gone out in subzero weather in the Antarctic, a blast of freezing horror right up the nose and freezing your brain so you staggered around thinking, “What hit me?” This didn’t happen to me more than a few times, though, before I learned to avert my nose.
There used to be Benzedrine inhalers that my dad sniffed constantly when I was growing up. At that time they sold tubes of Benzedrine over the counter for people with allergies. I think they cleared out your nose. There is a lot of mention of these benny inhalers in one of Kerouac’s books, and in other books I also read that people would take the cotton out of the tube and cook it to get whatever drug was inside in addition to the Benzedrine—some kind of narcotic? Codeine? Whatever. Anyway, Dad sniffed these the whole time I was growing up. Maybe the amyl nitrate was similar. I know people sniffed them at the moment of climax in sex, I guess to make their orgasms more intense.
There was sex taking place all over Studio 54. There were little alcoves and secret closets. There were so many stairs up to various balconies and lounge areas and it wasn’t much fun in high heels. In those days there weren’t any deadly or incurable diseases from having sex. Mostly boys and men were having sex with boys and men, but there were also men and women. But I averted my eyes if I bumped into any of this taking place.
There were people at the banquettes sitting around talking, people who were famous, but I didn’t know them. Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Mick Jagger. In retrospect, it seems amazing they weren’t locked up in some VIP room. But then, I don’t think anybody really gave it any thought. To me, what difference did it make who they were; even if I met them I wouldn’t have been able to hear them and mostly it was too dark to see anyway. One time I was chatting with an attractive Frenchman, or at least we were attempting to talk, and he gestured for me to follow him. We went upstairs where he opened a door to a little room and I followed him in. He shut it.
It was a closet with mops and buckets for all the vomit. He kissed me and then quickly stuck his fingers up my vulva. “Cut it out!” I said. I was twenty.
“You know what?” he said in a French accent. “I find you very boring.” He got up and left, shutting the closet door. Fortunately it didn’t lock. It was dawn by then and I used my life savings to get a taxi back downtown to my cousin’s loft, where I was staying. I didn’t have the key, though, and he had locked me out.
I banged and banged on the door, but my cousin must have been asleep. Only his sixty or seventy pets, which included parrots, toucans, cockatoos, hedgehogs, mynah birds, and a peacock, woke up and started to scream.
After an hour trying to get in, knocking on the door, and pleading, I realized he wasn’t going to let me in. So I curled up on the floor outside his door in the hall. I was scared.
There was a book published in 1978 entitled Disco. It had a lot of pictures from that time, and there was a big photograph of me dancing with some guy named Sam.
A few years later, in the early eighties, a book came out about graffiti, and there I am in another photo, at the Fun Gallery, surrounded by a gang of kids—Keith Haring, Futura 2000, I forget who else—who are all busy tagging my leather jacket with paint markers. I can’t find this book, not right now, or I would include this picture too. I have the book, somewhere. It’s buried in one of the boxes.
an influential teacher
My teacher at Barnard, and later at the Columbia M.F.A. program, was Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the founders of The New York Review of Books. She came from an era in New York City when literature, books, and the written word were powerful, consuming, important—being a writer or an editor or publisher was something that carried merit and weight in a totally different way than it does now. She was brilliant—married to Robert Lowell, who at that time had left her for Caroline Blackwood and was living in England or Ireland. My mother had taken class with Lowell in Boston. Hardwick was a wonderful teacher, a bit mad-scary as she addressed the woefully inadequate undergraduate women. She brought in and read aloud to us anything that interested her: E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, when it was first given to her in galleys; excerpts from Nijinsky’s Diary. I knew, even though I was of no importance, her enthusia
sm, intelligence, and passion for books were unique.
Her writing, too, was very fine—particularly her eloquent essays—although you could never read one without wondering afterward, “What actually is the point?” It was so skillfully done—she wrote so well without really saying anything, about Henry James and so many other topics.
She was something of a mentor to me. As an undergrad taking a writing class with her, I wrote a story, “Maggie, Angel,” and she generously submitted it for publication in the Intro Anthology series, an annual book of winning stories by creative-writing graduate students—I think my story was the only undergraduate work ever accepted. Her praise, though sparse, meant everything.
She was less of a mentor to me when I took class with her in graduate school, although she was still more encouraging to me than others. One student came to her office for a conference. “Now, wheah did I put your story?” Hardwick said, in her soft, fluty Kentucky drawl. “Wheah can I have put it? Oh, why, heah it is! I put it in my garbage pail.” And she slyly fished it out.
She had me to tea once, in her apartment in the Hotel des Artistes building, on West Sixty-Seventh Street, which was never a hotel but a unique apartment building above the Café des Artistes. Over the years I went to a number of apartments there. Each apartment, on entering, had a huge, dark wood-paneled room two stories high, with a staircase that led to a balcony on the second floor, off which extended bedrooms.
Apart from Elizabeth’s, I saw the home of Stuart Pivar, a friend of Warhol’s who was very wealthy from the plastics business (although everyone said he had invented the Ziploc bag). His place was decorated with crumbling Jacobean and Italian Renaissance furniture, heavy red velvet drapes everywhere, like a set from a Gothic horror movie. There was a gecko who was loose and hid behind the refrigerator, emerging to devour cockroaches. Stuart had weekly events hosting Julliard music students who played baroque and classical music, or opera students who sang, but you could never sit down because most of the chairs were too rickety to be of use.
Scream Page 9