by Richard Hell
It was impressive to be with her in high-pressure situations, like, say, when she had to deal with the emotional repercussions of some contact with Claes, such as when we went to his big opening at the Museum of Modern Art. I could see that she felt a little shaken, challenged, being the ex-wife, and one who’d played such a big role in the creation of the art, but it stimulated her and she would come through, wisecracking, in a way that didn’t leave room for doubt, disarming any potential intimidators. She was like a tough Howard Hawks broad, the life of the party, who would fall in love with an impossible person but always bob to the top no matter how rough it might get.
The program was that I’d come over to her place after work (when I was working—for weeks at a time she’d more or less take care of me) and we’d sit in the kitchen smoking grass, drinking scotch, with a record playing—Aretha Franklin, or Bob Dylan, say (“Respect” and “Call Me” and “Belle Isle”)—and she’d make us a salad and baked potato and broil a couple of very good thick steaks. Then we’d keep drinking the scotch, and smoking, until we went to bed and watched a little Johnny Carson and Joe Franklin maybe, and then have sex two or three times. I’ve read that a man’s sex drive peaks at nineteen, while a woman’s does at thirty-five. She was thirty-four and nine or ten months when we met and I was nineteen.
Larry Rivers, the hawk-nosed, fast-talking painter who was a bridge between abstract expressionism and pop and who was close to Frank O’Hara and all the other first-generation New York poets, lived in the loft above Patty’s. (Patty’s best friend was Larry’s British wife—from whom he’d been separated for a while—Clarice, formerly nanny for his kids. Clarice, who was in her early thirties too, was a funny party person herself, one of whose conspirators in those days was Jim Carroll, who was my age. One time Patty was on the phone when I arrived and when she hung up she told me she’d been speaking to Clarice, who was in her Central Park West bedroom putting women’s makeup on Jim. That sounded really glamorous and I was a little jealous.) Larry could hear the sound of us having sex coming from Patty’s loft underneath his the same as we could hear him honking on his sax at four AM. A couple of years later I learned that he’d drilled a peephole into his floor directly above Patty’s bed to supplement our noises. Patty told me he sometimes called me “Tarzan.”
Our time together was dramatic. She was headstrong, while I had a lot of pride even though I was a self-conscious innocent in her world. I actually hit her in the face one time—the only time I’ve ever hit a girl who didn’t want me to. We were on a road trip in the South and I was driving and she wouldn’t stop harassing me and I pulled off the road and smacked her. But I was often consternated in gatherings of her friends. They were all twenty years older than me and successful and famous and had known each other forever. If the group was smaller, it could be a lot more comfortable. The best artists were the kindest. I loved Rauschenberg. He was so generous and considerate. I had a great couple of lunches with Patty and Jasper Johns too. He was mandarin, but always wittily, nicely, teasingly. Probably my fondest memory of an encounter like that was the day Patty and Clarice and I spent with de Kooning at the house and studio he’d designed for himself in East Hampton, and then driving around with him and walking along the Atlantic. I was ignorant though. Something came up that afternoon that drew a Lautréamont reference from me and I was privately astounded that de Kooning responded with more Lautréamont. I didn’t think painters knew anything about writing.
Eventually, after a year and a half together, it was time for Patty and me to separate. Technically it was my decision, but it was obvious to us both that the gap in our ages and social circles was decisive finally; it was wisest to preempt, as much as we loved each other (we’re still friends). The finish came when she offered to take me with her on a trip of a month or two to Europe. I didn’t want to live off of her on that scale, but she might well go alone if I didn’t come, and I knew she’d have wild adventures there and that it would be the equivalent of our separating. I could see it was time to detach. It was emotional.
In the midst of the weeks of splitting up I turned twenty-one—she was thirty-seven then—and she made me a birthday dinner. It started with LSD, and then a feast of my favorite foods. She gave me a ten-speed racing bike too (I would sell it almost immediately). At a certain point she innocently remarked, “You’re only twenty-one once, you know,” and it caught me by surprise. I’d never quite understood time that way. I could never have a twenty-first birthday again. I started crying and then so did she and we were both sobbing.
From the notebooks and diaries I kept at that time I can see that I haven’t really changed much since then. I’ve learned things, about writing and other means of expression for instance, and learned other behaviors, but it’s that development of skills and further branching of behaviors that is the difference, not me myself, not what underlies the outer appearances. Of course what’s deepest down inside is boring; it’s actually the surface that’s interesting, even though it’s often deceptive. We’re probably all the same as each other deep down inside. (As Ron Padgett put it, “Am I a good person? Yes, after / a certain point, and no, after another. / Deep down I’m just down there, a kind of gurgling / black Jell-O that doesn’t have any idea / of what’s going on up here[ . . . ]”) A little above that, but still underneath the outward signs of a person, are the emphases that define one’s practical range of character, the realistic limitations to one’s identity. But we’re usually assessed according to our social existence. That’s not really any more fair than being judged by how well we make art. Still, it’s what’s interesting, whether that’s “fair” or not. People don’t really have the right to take credit for themselves at all. Ultimately, not only are we all the same, but what happens is out of our control. I suppose that’s what religions are about—coming to terms with the way that behind the veil, nobody is different from anyone else, much less better, and no one even has any real control over phenomena, including themselves—and is the sense in which religions are true, recommending, under the circumstances, surrender to “God” (which is to say, acceptance of “what happens”). All there is are the entertainments, pastimes, of love and work, the hope of keeping interested.
CHAPTER TEN
I moved directly from Patty’s to a place I’d gotten with a girl I’d recently met. Her name was Anni and she was just out of a midwestern university art program, working as an assistant to the sculptor Marisol. She was pale and tall and skinny with tightly curly, Orphan Annie–style big red hair and freckles. Her smile looked like a nervous, questioning, determined-to-please child’s, like her face was being stretched back from her ears, her inner eyebrows pointing upward, as if there should have been little sweat droplets flying from her forehead. It rent my heart. She had a willfully cheerful personality that mixed whimsy with wide-eyed morbidity.
Anni worked hard making artworks out of unusual materials, like tiny plastic doll accessories and flexible transparent plastic sheeting that she would sew things into, an iconography of rag dolls and Marilyn. She drew a lot with colored pencils. She was a good draftsman. The artworks were also cheerful in a childlike way, but so extremely as to seem possibly hostile and threatening. I worried about how the world would treat her.
We’d found a small room-and-a-fraction in a cheap factory building erected in the mid-nineteenth century as an armory. It was on Mott Street in Little Italy, diagonally opposite the primitive, rose-beige “old St. Patrick’s”—a two-hundred-year-old church (not the famous, more recent, uptown cathedral). Harvey Keitel prayed there in Scorsese’s early movies. We were the only tenants who actually lived in our building—technically illegally. The five-story warren of repair shops and small manufacturers went dead silent and spooky at night. Its shadowy rooms and passages were dirty, damp, gray-painted brick and plaster. The building extended deep belowground too, in multiple low-ceilinged sub-basements that looked as if illicit medical procedures or interrogations took place there.
&nbs
p; I was doing psychedelic drugs every few weeks: mushrooms and THC and acid. We had a friend named James who was a student at Yale who tripped with us sometimes. He was short, with a Beatles-style bowl cut—a friendly, fast-talking, analytical guy full of observations and theories who was attracted to the bohemian otherworldliness of our household. That period will forever be signified for me by the most psychedelic piece of writing I know of: the words that appeared, purplish-black and burnt-looking, the way drilled teeth smell, when James and Anni and I in turn, stoned on mushrooms, struck typewriter keys that smacked their heads through the ink ribbon into a fibrous sheet of typing paper, each in our attempt to spell the word “psilocybin,” thereby inadvertently producing, in the form of the type-indented sheet, a 2-and-a-half-D trigger for mushroom flashbacks.
Another time, I OD’d on THC. Sometimes a powdered concentrate of it would come to market and it was strong. I snorted it. On that night I was alone in the apartment, if “apartment” is the word. It was a brutally plain cubicle with a sink, as well as one tiny corner enclosure where we put a bed. We had a little refrigerator and a hot plate. The toilets were generic institutional multistalls in the hall. Our loft was more like a bomb shelter than an apartment, but I wasn’t consciously aware of how grim it was. I was just playing house there. It wasn’t an ideal environment for a psychedelic overdose, though, especially a solitary one.
I lay in the small bed in a fetal position with my eyes closed. Any sensory input was too much, though the places where my mind went, when closed off in itself, were also scary. Everything was so tense that the bottomless quiet of late night in the empty building was like a carnival haunted house—I’d be startled by some barely audible creak or snap, which it would then take three endless seconds for my consciousness to classify as nonthreatening and my pulse twenty seconds to recover from. For hours I lay in bed trying to remain still and limp. I’d keep my eyes closed until that would start to panic me too, and then I’d open them long enough to make sure I wasn’t somewhere scarier than my room, and then because that was too bright and cold and dirty I’d close them again. I dispersed evenly. At my most solid I was a set of molecules coalesced in an illusion of more or less cooperative operation, but the true nature and function of which was to ricochet and zoom around randomly in the void. I was permeable and undefined, space itself, meaningless cause and effect, like the rest of the universe, rather than a being of volition. Life was an extended car wreck. I tried to be patient enough as I waited for the drugs to wear off that I didn’t make things worse.
Finally, also, at this time, despite my natural alienation from society, I was becoming affected by the American political situation. Things had become so extreme that you were confronted everywhere, every day, with the conflicts. Nobody trusted or respected anybody. Nearly everybody thought they had the answers but nobody agreed with anybody else. Frightened and distraught and angry writings about Vietnam and Nixon fill my notebooks from the time. I especially sympathized with the Black Panthers and hated and despised Nixon and was horrified by what was happening in Vietnam, but all I ever did was express those feelings in journals and in talks with friends. I didn’t vote or march or write letters or contribute money. I had no conception of an effective resistance. I didn’t feel effectual, but like a particle that was being slapped around among all the others. The adult, administered world was comprehensible psychologically, but it operated in another dimension, was something that took place on the other side of the screen. I didn’t feel much different towards it than I had to the school authorities or to parents when I was a kid. They were oppressive but eternal, just something to escape.
When I left Anni, after a few months, I moved to an apartment two blocks away, at 173 Elizabeth Street, just past the southwest corner of Elizabeth and Spring, in the heart of Little Italy. I was working on what would be the final and best issue of Genesis : Grasp, a double issue, number 5/6. I’d bought a cheap used offset printing press from a repair shop in the Mott Street building and was doing the printing myself. Tom and I resumed our old inseparability, which would last for most of the coming three or four years.
The Elizabeth Street apartment was great, the best I’d ever had. It took up the whole top floor of a rickety tenement owned by the two old Italian brothers who ran the little grocery store in the building next door. It had four small rooms, arranged in a U shape, with the building’s stairwell, on the other side of my walls, in the middle of the U. The front door opened into the kitchen, and the kitchen led through an archway—there were no doors inside the apartment—into another little room where I put the printing press (which was only the size of a milk crate), which led to the right into the room containing my narrow bed, which, in another right turn, opened into the living room, which had a little sealed-up fireplace. Both the living room and kitchen had windows onto Elizabeth Street. The other two rooms each had a little, high, square window with an inward-opening wooden cover, like something in an old monastery, facing out back across the roofs. The floors slanted because the building was so old and settled and warped. The plaster on the walls was as fissured and dimensional and glowy as the encaustic of a Johns painting. In the mornings I would hear a rooster crowing. Sometimes I’d see him, white but tinged with soot, a naked red crest on his head and a drooping, flopping version of that under his beak, strutting around on the rooftop across the street.
In the Mott Street loft, 1971.
Tom was amused by the one tiny, thin, dented and burnt wire-handled pot I had, which I used to make oatmeal or boil water for instant coffee. (I don’t think I ever bought any pots and pans until I was over thirty-five—there’d always be enough junk for my purposes lying in a cabinet or drawer in every new place.) That pot was so ancient and damaged, it transported Tom to the battle of Antietam. Another thing that made an impression on him was the old label-free peanut butter jar in which I kept a dead turtle, as a sort of decoration or artwork, leaking its fluids.
Tom was working in a storefront bakery in the West Village, which was run by an Eastern spiritual sect. He had a solo late-night shift bagging bread. I hung with him there some nights. The loaves were very dense and heavy and supposedly nutritious. We got an unlimited supply for ourselves, and often the only food in my apartment would be a round brick or two of the bread, mayonnaise, and instant coffee. I subsisted for days on nothing else, except maybe a slice or two of pizza.
Tom and I bought books when we had any pocket change and then sold some of them when we were desperate. Back then, both sides of Fourth Avenue from Ninth Street to Fourteenth Street were lined almost entirely with used-book stores. Books were just about our only liquid assets. We would never sell the guitar or typewriter, and they were so beat up they had no pawn value.
By this time, every other job Tom and I got was in a used-book store, and rummaging through them was our main form of recreation as well—just to get out in the air and dig around. I had accounts at both Gotham and the Phoenix Book Shop on Jones Street in the West Village. The Phoenix was a hole in the wall run by an impatient, prissy guy named Bob Wilson. Wilson cared about poor poets and their poetry, though, and he’d give you respect if you had knowledge. The poetry section at the Phoenix always yielded a softly glowing little pamphlet or two that worked on our feelings and pleasure centers.
Then there was the little bookshop on Perry Street in the West Village, which Tom and I loved especially, because its proprietor, Mr. Sackin, made us so happy. I think the shop was called Perry Street Books. Mr. Sackin was an old man, like a quiet preoccupied balding small chicken or albino mole, whom we imagined as being perfectly gentle and humble and innocent. He was completely oblivious to us.*
Tom and Anni would come over and help me with printing and collating as I worked on putting together the new issue of the magazine. I had a couple of other friends I published in it too. One I met through Joel Fisher, who was a sculptor interested in paper. We included a work by Joel stapled into each copy of Genesis : Grasp number 4, a blank s
crap of rough paper that, though it wasn’t relevant to disclose in the issue, was made of pulp created in Joel’s digestive system. He’d eaten nothing but paper for a few days and then made fresh sheets from what came out of his butt. This person Joel introduced me to, Steven Schomberg, hung out at a chess club in the West Village. He was a little older than me, dark complected, plump, and hairy. His hair, black, was not long but profuse, hard to keep shaved on his face, and it curled from the edges of his dirty dime-store clothes. He sweated a lot. He was cheerful and driven. He’d fill a couple of thick notebooks every month. They were magnificent. He didn’t distinguish mass media from actual social interactions. In the notebooks he made small talk with women who flaunted their erogenous zones in porn magazines, and he got advice from comics superheroes. He pasted clipped imagery from porn and comics into the composition books, above handwritten captions, along with his colorful drawings, sometimes painted in hobby-model enamel, and his diagrams of scientific ideas and of visitors from outer space, as well as cursive prophetic stories about science and philosophy and celebrities and memories and predictions and personal knowledge and insights. By the time he finished with one of the half-inch-deep books with its black-and-white marbled covers, it would be swollen to three inches thick. I published some excerpts from one of them in that final issue of Genesis : Grasp.
Another guy I had a lot of contact with that year was Simon Schuchat. Simon was a sixteen-year-old who’d sent some poems to the magazine. I liked his writing a lot and eventually extracted a pamphlet from him that we published as one of the two “subscriber supplements” to Genesis : Grasp number 5/6. (Beginning with issue number 4, issues came with a young writer’s first book—5/6, being a double issue, came with Ernie Stomach’s uh as well as Simon’s Svelte. Ernie Stomach was really me—at the time I had the vague intention of spending the rest of my life writing under four or five completely separate distinct identities.) Simon went to high school in Washington, DC. He loved the New York poets, the St. Mark’s poets—New York School poets, first and second generations—whatever you want to call them. Schuchat would get up to New York whenever he could and he’d split his time between hanging with me and dropping in on Anne Waldman and Michael Brownstein and Ted Berrigan. He was a hefty guy with long hair who spoke in a ceaseless monologue. He just poured out talk, not frantically, but in a steady stream, rarely smiling, his face sweating a little. He liked a cigar. He was droll and romantic and resigned.*