Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  My boyfriend and I slept in one of those little cubbyholes where generations of Boy Scouts had been squished. The place was full of stuff because whoever Lou had bought it from had sold it to him with all the things in it, and though they had sent truckload after truckload to junk and vintage stores, there were still shelves displaying sets of chinaware with Mexican and western motifs and antler lamps and whatever else his wife had decided to keep.

  In the morning, when we got up, Lou took us around on some of his new toys, a couple of all-terrain or four-wheel-drive vehicles, things that at that time had just been developed. While they were not rich, it was definitely a lot of money to me. And there was a big crew of workers there, and the whole time we sat out by one of the ponds, this crew was mowing the lawns, coming closer and closer on tractors. I have a feeling Lou Reed did not know too much about having a staff of workers to maintain his property, or even that it might be possible to ask them to go mow farther away, and it was very apparent that these workers were going to leave the job and then go and report to others about what it was like to mow Lou Reed’s lawn and fields while he was there. Even though you also kind of knew that out in Blairstown, New Jersey, at that time, about 1984, not a whole lot of locals were even going to know who Lou Reed was. Such was my vacillating perception of fame.

  For a few years I did see him and Sylvia a fair bit. In the end it was my own jealousy that ended the friendship. If you don’t have any shoes and nowhere to live, you don’t want to admire someone’s apartment and their closet contents.

  on andy warhol

  When he was alive, a lot of people hated Andy Warhol. He just ignored it. That is one reason I got out of the city, the way the people sneer at you. They have such contempt—until you die and suddenly they were your friend.

  We used to have dinner two or three times a week, usually with Paige Powell, who was the advertising director at Interview.

  I was never in Andy Warhol’s house when he was alive. He didn’t have people over. He had a big limestone house on Sixty-Sixth Street off Madison Avenue or thereabouts. I knew only one person who was in there when Andy was alive, other than his two boyfriends, who I only met after their relationships were over.

  But a friend of mine, Benjamin Liu, had been to Andy’s for lunch. Andy had a lot of stuff. The house was full. The kitchen was in the basement, the way it is in a lot of these old mansions in New York City. That’s because when these houses were built, the people had a staff. The cook used to make the food. The cook would make the food, and the maid or butler would bring it upstairs to the family, who did not want to witness the horror of food preparation nor participate in it.

  Andy did have staff, a man and a woman who I think were brother and sister from the Philippines, but they didn’t live there. Anyone who has spent time talking to “staff” who work for you in your home—as housekeepers, or cooks, or whatever they do—must eventually discover or realize, these people—whether in New York or Brazil or Florida—leave their job and take all kinds of transportation to travel many hours to get home, to return to a home that (in New York City) is in one of the far reaches of another borough, the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens, or somewhere far out. There is someone out there who, someday, will write about the modern lives of workers. Anyway, this couple, Andy’s staff, weren’t there that day.

  Andy took Benjamin to the basement and made him Campbell’s soup. That’s what was on the shelves. All of the kitchen shelves were lined with Campbell’s soup. I don’t know what they would have cooked for him, had it not been their day off. Probably Campbell’s soup.

  But whether or not they were there, most of the time Andy was not.

  He slept there. In the morning, the first thing he did was call Pat Hackett. He would spend an hour on the phone with her while she tape-recorded his adventures and events of the night before. He spoke to her for at least one hour a day. And when he died, she had the job to transcribe all he had said—over a period of years and years—and edit it to what she deemed the most important, for publication in his posthumous diaries.

  It was her decision, what to include and what not to include. He was extremely funny and interesting and his insights and observations were brilliant. But, in addition to his thoughts and ideas and observations, he would also say (at an event, for example) “Oh! There’s Barbara Eden! She looks great.”

  So in the morning, he would tell Pat Hackett many things, and among the things would be a comment such as, “And then we saw Barbara Eden at the Odeon—she looked great.”

  When Hackett edited these diaries, that was what was of interest to her: who Andy had seen and what he or she was wearing and what restaurants or clubs he had been to. Not the other stuff, his comments and remarks and ideas and thoughts. To me, his diaries are not at all what it was like to talk to him or listen to him.

  Somewhere out there is the Other Diary of Andy Warhol—the pages that were not published or included—probably far more interesting.

  Every day, after he talked on the phone, he went for breakfast, he went to his art factory, he had meetings, he went to lunch, he went to more meetings (with, say, advertisers or socialites). He went to a gym. He went to a dermatologist, a doctor, etc.

  He went to perfume launches (I hadn’t known previously that perfume companies will launch a new perfume, like a book, every season or two) or openings, readings, fashion shows.

  He went to dinner, he went to premieres of movies or dance companies, he went to hear music, he went to clubs.

  He went and went until he went home, about midnight or 1 A.M., and then he talked to Paige on the phone.

  Then he went to sleep.

  He was alone. He was lonely. He missed his mother, who he had lived with up until her death. He went to church several times a week. But when you keep that busy, you don’t have to pay attention to how alone you really are.

  After his death I did go into his home, and even though massive quantities of possessions had already been discarded, there was still so much stuff you could hardly get around.

  If he went out, people gave him things. If he went to a perfume launch, he would get bags containing bottles. He did like perfume though, especially “Beautiful” by Estée Lauder. How many new perfumes can you have? How much perfume can you wear?

  Andy grew up very poor. When you are very poor growing up, you want things.

  Then, later in life, even though you don’t really want stuff anymore, you can’t believe it when you actually get things.

  I went with Andy to the flea markets a few times. He went every weekend, and whatever he saw that he liked, he bought. I didn’t have money, so for me, it was no fun. There he was, buying cookie jars and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of puffins and cowboy boots and pigs—but all I could do was just stand and watch and covet. The dealers hovered around him because they knew whatever Andy inquired about, he wasn’t going to be able to bargain.

  He was Andy Warhol; he was going to pay top flea-market dollar for those salt and pepper shakers that looked like pooping donkeys.

  You want to have rich friends, if you are poor, but you want to have their money. But the rich people don’t really want to have to spend their money on you. The richer the person, the cheaper they are.

  In some ways Andy was very generous; he always took me out to dinner. On the other hand, usually the dinners were free because he had traded ad space in his magazine, Interview, in return for, say, seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of free dinners.

  You still had to pay the tip, though, which he or Paige did. Andy was generous, in his own way. If you went to a flea market with him, he was not saying, “Gee, would you like me to buy that salt and pepper shaker you are coveting?” But he paid for dinners, or at least the tip.

  And he gave me a little silk screen on canvas, at Christmas, and he and Paige bought me a winter coat one year when they couldn’t stand seeing me shivering anymore, and he bought me other things, like a little beaded pocketbook. Right before he died
, he told me he had a Christmas present for me, waiting at his house. But first he had to go to Milan, to show his Last Supper paintings. He didn’t have a gallery in New York City. He had only had one museum retrospective, and that was eons ago. Now the only place he could show this latest work was in Italy, and it did not get good reviews. He never appeared embittered. He was kind and generous. Later, after his death, movies and biopictures came out. There was a movie about Edie Sedgwick. In the film, the character playing Edie was complaining Andy only gave her twenty-five dollars to appear in one of his movies.

  Those movies—when he was alive—didn’t make money; they were art. Edie was a troubled rich girl who ran through her trust fund, made an art film, and then complained she hadn’t gotten paid enough.

  You don’t and can’t expect your friends to buy things for you. That’s not what I am saying.

  It’s just hard to know someone who is rich when you are poor.

  There used to be an editor I knew at Interview. I would go out to dinner with that person knowing I could only get one glass of wine and an appetizer because that’s all I could afford. And the editor got, like, three glasses of wine and an appetizer and a main course and dessert and when the bill came she said, “Let’s split the bill.”

  The whole dinner, I had been counting my pennies. I ate as little as I could because I could not afford anything else.

  Because I was a poor person, wanting to maintain a relationship with the editor, I was forced into this, even though she had an inheritance, a lawyer husband also with inherited money, a good-paying magazine job, an expense account, a brownstone in Brooklyn with Warhol silk screens of Mick Jagger on the wall, and a huge farmhouse in Northport, Long Island (which at that time was not the best place to have a country weekend home but was still more than I would have ever dreamed of). Yet she was not going to pay her share of dinner, let alone pay for mine.

  If you have more money, you should pay if the other person is so very poor, is all I’m saying.

  Andy was generous. Not mad-crazy generous, but generous. Yet the people who were his peers in the city acted scornful of this man who they said was a used-up, cheap, tight, has-been pop artist. The rage directed toward him was palpable.

  One time Andy was giving a reading from his book America at Rizzoli Bookstore in SoHo. Some kid ran in, ripped off his wig, and ran out.

  It was awful. You go to see a person—for free—and you go to hear a reading and you try to humiliate that person?

  Andy was great, though. He just pulled up the hood of his leather jacket and went on reading.

  Another time, a few of us were at an event at the Limelight, which was an old church that had been converted into a nightclub, and it was crowded and we were walking up the stairs and Andy was in the middle and suddenly as a group we realized: Andy was about to be attacked. We felt waves of hostility coming toward him and we knew the crowd was about to shove and push and knock him down the stairs. Involuntarily, unthinkingly, we all packed up around him and got him up the stairs in a protected fashion, into the back VIP room where there was more security. Those waves of hate and violence coming at him were scary.

  He acted oblivious to it, though. If it were me, I would go home and I would cry and I would never go out again.

  I don’t know if it was because he was Catholic and he had to pretend everything was okay and not complain, or if he was pleased to get attention. I never did know. You could sit next to him at a movie—a bad movie—or a dance performance and you could look over and find he was fast asleep. Then afterward, “Oh, gee, that was great, wasn’t it!” he said.

  Many times it wasn’t. But he said, “Oh, gee, that’s great!” about everything.

  On the one hand, acting happy and positive and upbeat is good. On the other, he had at least as many enemies for being nice as other people did who were nasty, mean, vitriolic, and gossiping.

  He wanted to appear like an onion, many layers but all exactly the same; you can peel an onion and you never get down to anything different. There is no substratum.

  But you could tell that he was more complicated than that. Inside there was a suffering, lonely entity.

  Conversely, I have met people who wanted to appear complex and multilayered but who really were like an onion. As layer after layer fell away, there was no difference, no matter how intimate we became: their surface was the same as their depths.

  i buy an apartment

  In 1987 I had money for the first time, so I bought an apartment. I had saved and saved and finally had forty grand, enough to pay the deposit on an apartment under two hundred thousand.

  It was a one-bedroom basement apartment, dark and overpriced, but it had a large garden. I was determined to have a garden, not a terrace. I wanted to be able to open the door for the dogs and I wanted to plant things. Note to reader: if you want to do that you should not live in New York City.

  I had enough money—barely—to buy the place, from the success I had had. My success was not from Slaves of New York (book advance: thirty-five hundred dollars) and not from Andy Warhol’s acquiring of the movie rights (purchase price: five thousand dollars). At the time when Andy said he wanted to make Slaves of New York into a movie, he said I could have five thousand dollars or choose one of his paintings.

  “But Andy,” I said, “what I really need is a place to live! I don’t have anywhere to live and I can’t find an apartment. You have a lot of different property in New York City, can’t you let me stay in one?”

  But he said no.

  “Okay, I will take the five thousand dollars,” I said. Because what was I going to do, with nowhere to live, walk around the streets of New York carrying a Warhol under my arm?

  But I had saved money in a myriad of ways: the stories I sold to The New Yorker, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, becoming the Alfred Hodder Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton (a paid salary position), and so on, but mostly by virtue of never buying anything and never spending anything. (And some money Merchant Ivory paid for the movie rights after Andy died. Who knows how much they had to pay Andy’s estate for the rights he had previously bought from me?) So finally I was able to buy an apartment and I threw all my stuff in there, still in boxes, half unpacked, and then left for my book tour.

  First I went home to see my mother. “I wish there was a way I could make copies of these phonograph records,” I said. “If only there was some way I could get them on tape.” You see, back then we had records, and tapes. Cassette tapes. I had a tape player but no record player. My mother had a record player but no speakers. I wanted my childhood music—Marais and Miranda, for one, South African folk singers who sang, “the baboon climbed the hill.” But there was no way to get the tunes heard, or to move them from one format to another.

  You go to different places on a tour: the first time it’s fun, the second time it’s not so much fun, and by the third time, forget it. This was only my second time out, though, so I was still enjoying myself. It was for my third book, A Cannibal in Manhattan. (There hadn’t been any budget for a tour for American Dad.)

  This trip went west to Denver, where I stayed in a hotel with ducks that paraded through the lobby every morning, either leaving or arriving at the fountain. And it was at a reading in Denver where I randomly began complaining to the audience about my first-grade teacher, who then happened to walk through the door. It was at a bookstore in the Haight district of San Francisco where the booksellers asked me to sign a copy for Robin Williams, who had prepaid but wasn’t able to make the event. But it was in L.A. when my publicist came up to me in the lobby as I was leaving. “Look, I don’t know how to say this without getting you all upset, but I got a call from your neighbor,” she said.

  “My neighbor? Who is that?” I don’t know if I had even met my new neighbors—I hadn’t even stayed in my new apartment yet. “How did he get ahold of you?”

  “He tracked me down through the publishing company. He was trying to find you. There’s been
a break-in. A robbery in your apartment.”

  “Oh no! What happened?”

  “I’m sorry. According to your neighbor Jerry Mack, the police say your place is trashed. It’s bad. They found some of your stuff in the alley, and they put it back inside.”

  It was midnight by the time I got home to New York. I couldn’t get in; the lock had been broken. I went to my new neighbor, who lived in the matching basement apartment next to mine, and waited for the locksmith. “Yup,” said Jerry. “It happened last night. I heard them. They ran. I found the stuff they dumped as they were running.”

  “Please, once the locksmith has the door fixed, come inside with me. I’m scared.”

  We went in.

  It was exactly as I had left it—half-unpacked, with the boxes of clothes and other things—but nothing was missing or moved, except half a carton of orange juice from the fridge, now on the counter.

  I guess the burglars were thirsty. “That’s the stuff I found in the alley,” Jerry said, pointing to a pile. “All your music.”

  It was a bunch of cassettes. They weren’t mine. They must have been in the burglar’s bag from a different robbery. “Look!” I said, reading the handwritten labels. “It’s Marais and Miranda, the folksingers from South Africa!”

  The tapes had all the songs I wanted.

  a city of rich and poor

  The eighties and early nineties were years of a lot of extravagance. Because there wasn’t any real Internet yet, the magazines were very important. At that time, as well, the homeless situation in the city was bad. The streets, the subways, any doorway: someone was there, defecating, pushing a shopping cart full of rotting produce, opening the door to the bank for you and demanding money for the service. The mentally ill had been given antipsychotics and released from the asylums; they dumped or exchanged their pills for stuffed animals and small gray bananas. Nothing was renovated. It was not a rich white person’s city. It was not the city it is today. It was falling apart. It was a city of the homeless. And the homeless were at home.