by Tim Sultan
Although the 1950s and ’60s were New York’s most productive artistic period, he wasn’t aware of the currents that had made the city the hub of the contemporary art world. He knew as little about Philip Guston as he knew about Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, color field painting, or action painting. He found his early schooling not in museums and galleries but in churches. His first themes were religious—Madonnas, saints, and crucifixions—and his depictions were figurative. He came across a copy of Death in the Afternoon and began making studies from the photographs of bullfighters included in the book. It would take him years, as he would tell me later, to get beyond painting what the eye sees and to understand the thought process behind abstractions. While many of his contemporaries were expanding their consciousness through psychedelic agents, something Sunny always shunned, his doors of perception would gradually be opened by the brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning.
A café owner he befriended asked him to hang his work in his shop, which led to his first commission. In exchange for free meals of lamb provençal and coq au vin, he spent a year creating landscape murals for a newly opened restaurant on the Upper East Side called Le Boeuf a la Mode, the kind of place where the clientele might have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. The owner, Etienne, encouraged him to paint in the evenings while the well-heeled patrons were dining, so as to be a novel attraction in his own right: “the artist at work.” He soon began receiving private commissions for portraiture by some of the regular customers, one of whom, a department store heiress named Alice, would become his patron and intermittent lover for over a decade, though she was more than twice his age.
He was living in an apartment near Brooklyn College then and occasionally socialized with students he met at a neighborhood art supply store. Evenings when he wasn’t at work in Manhattan, he often had jazz musicians come over to play in his living room and one such night, he was introduced to a psychology student named Frederica—Fredi, for short. The two became romantically involved very quickly and decided to marry in short order. It was 1963. She was black and the notion of being involved with a woman of a different race was entirely taboo in his old neighborhood. But when he told his father of his plans, Ralph only asked, “Do you love her?”
Sunny and Fredi moved to Bleecker Street in the West Village and soon had a daughter they named Tracy. In the afternoons, Sunny would take the two in his camper bus to the Rockaways in Queens, a revolver tucked into his beach bag in case anyone gave the mixed-race family any trouble. Fredi was grounded and earnest, her mind on family and earning a Ph.D. at New York University, while Sunny was decidedly undomestic in his routines, becoming increasingly caught up in socializing with other artists and drinking heavily. His customary outfit in those years was an Abercrombie & Fitch safari suit, of which he owned several, and at night, wearing this Hemingwayesque getup, he went to Fanelli’s in SoHo, the Cedar Street Tavern, and, particularly, Max’s Kansas City. Every generation of New York artists, except our own, seems to have its celebrated watering holes, but at the time, Sunny merely thought of them as places where one could drink and hang out with like-minded people. He began dividing his time between Bleecker Street and a loft on Wooster Street, paid for by Alice, his uptown benefactress. His marriage soon deteriorated. He would later say that he had an unmatrimonial constitution. By Sunny’s accounts, this seemed to be a common condition at the time. One night at Max’s, he met a Greek woman named Catherine, an heiress as well and herself recently divorced. She had married a Venizélos, the most famous political family in Greece—the closest American equivalent would be a Kennedy—but by the time she met Sunny, she was an acolyte of an unknown Indian guru named Acharya Rajneesh.
Catherine went home with Sunny the first night they met, joining a carousel of mistresses that made his romantic life a complicated juggling act. While maintaining relationships with Fredi and Alice, he had also impregnated a sometime girlfriend named Mary, who only stayed long enough for Sunny to name the newborn Paul, after Cézanne, before moving back to California. Paul and Sunny wouldn’t see each other for another thirty years, a span of time their relationship never could entirely overcome.
There were countless other passing entanglements. It wasn’t unusual for Sunny to be with three women in a single day. In the mornings he would try to remember the lies he told the night before. He thought to himself more than once, “Everyone thinks I’m in love with them and meantime, I don’t have a clear enough heart to love anything. I’m just satisfying my desires, a prisoner to the stories I’m telling.” After he was given a book on St. Francis, he briefly considered becoming a Franciscan monk. He also dabbled in Krishnamurti and Meister Eckhart—this was the 1960s, after all. When Catherine said that she would like to make a gift to him by buying him a plane ticket to India to meet her spiritual teacher, Sunny was ready to go.
He arrived in Bombay in the company of two nuns who had left their convent. Like Sunny, they were on a spiritual journey. He had little money; his luggage contained his safari suits, several dozen boxes of Wheatena cereal, a number of carefully wrapped jars of honey, and a supply of razor blades to last several years. Sunny was tremendously fond of Wheatena which, along with honey and razor blades, he had been told would be hard to find in India. The customs agents gathered around his open suitcases in suspicious bewilderment, chattering amongst themselves, until Sunny presented each with a box and assured them it would help with their digestions. They were exceedingly appreciative and, with several bows, he was allowed into India.
Although eager to see this land that was mysterious and full of fantasies that he had created for himself, he had developed a tremendous cold on the airplane and he took a taxi to an apartment that Catherine rented in the Breach Candy section of the city and promptly went to sleep for three days. He woke to a clanging sound and looked out the open window to see a boy with bandy legs bicycling away, milk cans banging against his wheels. He went outside and began walking and it seemed as though in three days’ sleep he had been transported back three centuries. Servants slept on mats in stairwells and street vendors served food in cones of newspaper or leaf. Turbaned dentists sat on the ground in lotus position with their implements laid out on blankets in front of them. There were ox-carts in the streets and the cars appeared to run not on gasoline but on horns. Although the city was very poor, there was little garbage—everything seemed to be consumed. There was a great abundance of rats but in this upside-down world he had entered, they were revered, not hunted. To his amazement, they perched carefree on walls in broad daylight and scuttered untroubled amongst the legs of people sitting at outdoor restaurants.
He remained in Bombay for several weeks before taking a train to Rajasthan, a mountainous state in the northwestern part of the country, where Rajneesh had set up a meditation camp in a place called Mount Abu. He had yet to call himself Bhagwan Rajneesh, the name by which much of the world would come to know him. At sunrise on the morning after his arrival, Sunny rose to join the other disciples in their daily meditation exercises, imagining that he would be sitting cross-legged, contemplating otherworldly matters. Instead, he soon found himself hopping on the balls of his feet while making owl-like cries (hoo hoo hoo). He also, at various times, panted with rapid shallow breaths, thrashed about epileptically, and lay on the ground in a state of outright exhaustion. All the while, a balding, heavily bearded man addressed the group, from his perch on an armchair, with a lilting Indian accent. “Act upon any impulse you have,” he said, as some pounded the floor with their fists. Others writhed and jiggled. Many howled. “This is catharsis,” he continued. “If you want to scream, scream. If you want to cry or laugh or beat the earth, cry or laugh or beat the earth. If you want to tear your clothes off, tear them off. If you want to copulate in the dust, copulate in the dust. Once an impulse has been expressed, one is free of it. Madness is the lack of expression of insanity. In order to become sane one first has to become mad.”
Though he never would copulate in the
dust, Sunny took to his meditation with great diligence, often performing the hour-long exercise both morning and night. And Rajneesh took to Sunny, recognizing in him a highly charismatic personality with a gift for language, someone who could be an effective proselytizer. He gave him a new name, Swami Dharmananda, as the mark of being a sannyasin—an initiate. Soon “Swami Dharmananda” was invited to private audiences and to sit alongside Rajneesh onstage, to travel by train to the homes of wealthy benefactors, and to be seen as his right-hand man. Sunny had never met anyone so learned. Rajneesh’s apartment back in Bombay included a vast library containing thousands of books—so many books that one needed to climb a rolling ladder to reach many of them—and Rajneesh claimed to have read them all. He would call himself the most educated person in the world. His lectures, given while sitting perfectly still in an armchair, touched on all manner of philosophy, psychology, history, and literature. He was equally likely to reference Freud, the Upanishads, or Tolstoy. Sunny was unfamiliar with Russian literature, theories of psychoanalysis, the precepts of Jainism, and many of the arcane subjects on which the discourses touched, but he became convinced that he was in the presence of an extraordinary mind—or at least one that possessed a photographic memory.
Sunny did not spend all of his time in Mount Abu. He traveled in the countryside and Alice regularly wired him money, with which he rented an apartment in Bombay and returned to New York periodically, though seeing little of his daughter, Tracy, and his estranged wife. (Fredi never would forgive him for his straying ways early in their marriage.) Wearing his orange pajamas and beaded necklace while walking about in Greenwich Village, he was often mistaken for a Hare Krishna. In Washington Square Park, he played the bongo drums. He also proselytized and persuaded and opened the eyes of future sannyasins. He never went home to Red Hook on these visits either, feeling entirely estranged from that world. How could he explain to his childhood friends that he had become the consigliere to a man who wore tunics, denounced social conditioning, and championed sexual liberation?
In India, the scales fell from Sunny’s eyes little by little. As the number of followers of Rajneesh grew from a few dozen into the hundreds, he began to recognize the same sorts of jealousies, the same envies, among the other sannyasins that he had encountered in the New York art world. A spiritual competitiveness as to who was the most enlightened. And Rajneesh, too, began to disenchant him.
He had already overheard him advising wealthy Western women to marry Indian acolytes from his inner circle, ceding their names and their bank accounts. He couldn’t help but notice that for a spiritual guide, Rajneesh seemed to have an uncommon regard for treasure. He wore a diamond-covered watch and though he only drove a humble Impala, he often mentioned a desire to upgrade. He would, in time, acquire a Mercedes and a fleet of Rolls-Royces numbering more than ninety. When one of his disciples’ teenage daughters asked Rajneesh whether he thought it was a good idea for her to smuggle hashish out of the country, Rajneesh replied, “If you have the impulse to do it, do it. That which is within your system must be expressed, but be willing to suffer the consequences—along with the consequences you will find a truth that will bring you to a higher consciousness.” Privately, Sunny began to have serious doubts as to the quality of advice the sannyasins were receiving.
On a trip back to New York, Sunny learned of the discovery of endorphins and a phenomenon called the runner’s high, and he recalled how at the end of the dynamic meditation exercises, when the sannyasins had collapsed to the ground from exhaustion, Rajneesh would say, “Now you feel the state of grace descending upon you.” Was it grace, he now wondered, or more earthly hormones that were descending on them? In fact, the thought had crossed his mind more than once that Rajneesh often seemed less holy than wholly out of it, as if he had been smoking opium. In the early days, Sunny had always sat in the front row at Rajneesh’s lectures, eager to show his devotion, but as his doubts grew and he began to feel that he had been used, he found himself moving farther and farther toward the back of the lecture hall.
By the time the day came when Rajneesh gave a talk on modern art, Sunny was sitting in the last row. He was practically sitting outside. Sunny hadn’t always understood all the recondite topics that Rajneesh touched on during his discourses, but he knew something about the history of modern art. And when Rajneesh began equating the distortion of images in Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s paintings with the loss of values in the West, Sunny said in his mind, “This guy has no idea. He has no idea as to the concepts that went into the creation of these images.” Sunny had been enthralled by Picasso and the evolution of his theories from the early blue period to his African period and Cubism and the surrealism of his later years, and to hear Rajneesh talk so ignorantly about the matter dashed whatever remained of the admiration he had once felt for him. He went back to his room and composed a letter denouncing Rajneesh as a spiritual Pied Piper and a fraud. He mailed his denunciation to a Bombay newspaper; soon after it was published, the two former nuns with whom he had first traveled to India came to warn him that there was a plot on his life. By then, Rajneesh traveled with a cadre of sullen bodyguards armed with pistols and Sunny did not need further persuading. He packed his few belongings and left his room that same night, and soon was on a plane destined for New York, turning his back on Rajneesh and all organized religion.
Sunny tried to resume his former way of life, returning to Max’s Kansas City, now in its second incarnation. Alice, his friend and patron, who had supported him all these years, died not long after he returned and left him a rich sum of money, which he kept stowed in a dresser drawer and would spend in a year’s time on drinking and passing friendships. He felt intensely lonely and adrift. India had ended on a bad note for him, and he now viewed the time he spent there as a failed attempt at taking a shortcut to spiritual contentment. (The only sense of contentment he had ever really felt was in the act of making art. He thought of it as making friendship with art—what effort one put into one’s work, the work gave back.)
In 1978, he returned to Red Hook and with his remaining $3000 bought a tiny house not far from the bar above which his father and mother still lived. He had never expected to return to the neighborhood, but the familiarity of his parents and his childhood home provided some semblance of substance to his life. His uncle still opened the bar at dawn to serve breakfast and Sunny settled into a routine of coming in around noon and helping with the lunchtime and afternoon customers, who were nearly all steadies, while his father sat in the back room taking numbers for bookies. An intensely honest man, Ralph, now in his seventies, would play regulars’ numbers (it was customary to have a lucky number) even when they didn’t personally come in to place bets, and pay out the winnings if the number hit.
It was a quiet and uninterrupted existence that Sunny would maintain through his father’s death in 1987 and right up till Uncle John died seven years later, not long before we met.
Rajneesh, meanwhile, fled tax collectors, first turning up in New Jersey (all crooks seem to head for Jersey at some point, except those already living in Jersey), and eventually the Pacific Northwest. He died in 1990. Once or twice, in more recent years, Sunny had come face-to-face with customers who were wearing the telltale beaded malas of Rajneesh’s true believers, but he didn’t let on. Sunny had always considered paranoia to be merely a form of prudence. As far as he knew, the hit Rajneesh placed on him was never lifted.
* * *
21
Good Friday
As with anyone operating outside the law for a long time, we were very conscious of the ephemerality of our situation. It was like conducting a secret love affair that is destined to be found out, but one cannot bring oneself to break it off until it has run its course. In the spring of 2001, Red Hook still felt as uncharted as the night I had first stepped into the bar. Wild dogs with lycanthropic tendencies even now terrorized bicyclists reckless enough to traverse the most shadowed stretches of the neighborhood at night, a
nd in the mornings one still came across charred wrecks left like oblations to whatever saint watches over car thieves. When one other solitary bar opened on a lonesome corner a quarter mile away, Sunny was outwardly supportive but privately uneasy, anxious that the existence of an actual licensed bar would bring unwanted attention by city officials on the neighborhood.
The authorities were not unacquainted with Sunny’s. When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents who had moved into an unmarked fortified building nearby several years earlier came to drink their beers, they did so inconspicuously and unobtrusively, happy to be collaborationists. Two plainclothes officers in an unmarked police car had driven slowly by the bar on many Friday nights, stopping to say hello if Sunny or I happened to be standing outside. They were sociable in the way a beat cop from an earlier era might be. “How’s the night going?” “You’re not having any trouble with anybody?” “Starks or Sprewell?” (If they had only asked “Klimt or Klee?” they would have gotten an impassioned disquisition on the subject.)
The end came abruptly, in the form of a police van that pulled up to the bar on the evening of Good Friday. Sunny signaled for the band to keep playing so the customers wouldn’t grow uneasy and he went outside to greet the officers. But these officers were strangers and they asked different kinds of questions. They were unhappy when Sunny handed them an outdated floor plan. They disapproved of the expired occupancy permit. They frowned at the dancing they observed through the window. They blanched when Sunny failed to produce a valid liquor license. They ordered the bar shut on the spot.