by Richard Hell
I was ready to move on though. The magazine had run its course. I thought I’d start a new publishing venture called The Philosophical Review to fulfill the promise of identity-sabotaging invention, mockery, despair, and musicality that we had begun to approach in the final issue or two of Genesis : Grasp. But within a year and a half, music would come to dominate.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
By 1971 Tom had found the apartment on Eleventh Street where he’d live for the next few years—322 East Eleventh, between First and Second Avenues. It was a small three-room railroad apartment on the second floor, in back. As usual, the front door opened into the kitchen, where the bathtub was too, and, facing into the kitchen from that doorway, the living room was to the left, with windows out into sunlit paved yards and alleys, and a tiny dark bedroom to the right, its bed a platform up near the ceiling to preserve floor space underneath. The little water-closet toilet was beyond the bedroom.
That apartment of his takes up a big area in my memories. It was in the center of our territory in the East Village. I spent half my time at his place. It’s where we would write Wanna Go Out? as well as write and rehearse and cassette-record our first songs.
My apartment on the top floor on Elizabeth Street, in contrast, reverberated like a gothic bell with loneliness and frustration. I would lie on the bed there and stare at the wall, shaken, oppressed, the jar of dead turtle ensconced on its desk shelf in the next room, the flat’s slanted floors cold expressionism, a tiny poetry press in the passage behind me, the empty refrigerator beyond that. I felt like a vampire there, someone with secrets from everyone, who, by that token, was cheating and exploiting everyone, especially the girls I used for sex and ego caresses, without usually finding very much more to be interested in about them, well aware that this was my own failing.
At Tom’s there was strength in numbers, even if the numbers were only one, two. There were lots of things we could say to each other and ways we could behave that no one else we knew appreciated or even perceived. I don’t know how much the nature of it was a function of our youth or our low social status and lack of power—our placement outside of any society but each other—but it was the most meaningful friendship I’ve had, I think, and the last male friendship of its importance. While in many ways we didn’t even like each other. Years later I got a note from Ted Berrigan inviting me to a reading he was giving with Ron Padgett. He wrote that it was the event of the season or something like that and added that he and Ron hated each other as only best friends can. It was the first time I’d seen that syndrome identified, but I knew exactly what he meant, because of Tom and me. The hatred came a little later though. When our friendship was at its most intense, when it was fully active, the hatred was more a kind of tension or confusion, a kind of unease at being a little off balance half the time. We needed each other, and because that made us vulnerable, we resented each other for it, and, after a while, also, just because we’d gotten to know each other so well, we might have despised each other a little. Then there was the unspoken competition going on. This is a particular, atypical type of friendship, but I don’t think it’s unusual among young artists, at least among egotistical ambitious young artists.
It was in this time, 1971 through 1975, that we settled into the bookstore jobs, the last series of day jobs we would have before becoming professional musicians. Tom had an interesting one for a while with a dealer of books that were translations into English. We discovered a lot of writers because of that, like Albert Cossery (A Life Full of Holes), Knut Hamsun (Hunger), and the interesting poets Robert Bly translated and published in small editions for his The Fifties and then The Sixties and then The Seventies literary magazines, like George Trakl, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rumi, and Rilke. We both had jobs at the Strand for a while—me for the second time—though not simultaneously. Our final day jobs were at a specialty bookshop devoted to movies—literature as well as graphics (stills and posters), etc., too—called Cinemabilia, where we did both work at the same time for a while.
We also always read the new books, mostly mimeographed, stapled pamphlets, from the “second generation New York School” poets linked to the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project, which was a block away from Tom’s apartment. I was more interested in those guys than Tom was though. He could never accept the low-key, daily, Frank O’Hara chitchat, “I did this, I did that” style they used a lot. We both liked their wise-guy ways and cartooniness and wildness though, and their most abstract stuff. The least-known of our favorites among them was a guy named Tom Veitch, who did actually end up writing for comic books (though dullish sci-fi/fantasy), as well as becoming a cloistered monk for a while—which was probably a side of him Tom could relate to.
Veitch was brilliant and hilarious—he actually tore through the veil by goofing. One of my favorite artifacts of that great American poetry moment is Veitch’s Toad Poems, a mimeo booklet attributed only to “PSEUDONYM” and introduced by a one-page “Preliminary Toast” from Veitch’s good friend Ron Padgett. Padgett wrote, “I’ve always dreamed of a poetry that would be, without any special connotations to the word, bad, as well as pleasurable,” and continued as to how he’d “never read anything so genuinely sub-intelligent and unconcerned, yet perfectly aware of itself” as this book’s poetry.
The first poem in it goes:
Cats Climb Trees
Cats climb trees because they are
Afraid of Dogs.
My dog was not afraid of me,
So I never climbed any trees.
Twenty years ago this happened.
Since then my dog has died
and been buried under a tree
in our front yard.
Today I climbed that tree for
the first time, to chase down a
cat named Melvin who had got
caught up there after running
from my new dog whose name
shall not be mentioned
(We call him Ron)
My Sister wrote that.
It’s terrible by any standard except one’s favored one, by which it is real good. Tom liked Veitch even if he wouldn’t class him with Rilke or Rumi. In fact, Tom’s own poetry of the time had values not dissimilar to Veitch’s. For instance, one of my favorites of Tom’s poems I ever saw was an untitled and unparaphraseable two lines about a day’s endless sky through his “noses” leaving him breathless and how that must have followed from his cowboyness.
That one I published in Genesis : Grasp and had scheduled to appear in a pamphlet of his things I intended to call Merde, which I planned for Philosophical Review Editions.
In my memory the entire two or three years of 1971–73, as Tom and I took in everything together and I peaked in poetry and then shifted to rock and roll, happened in springtime. It sounds symbolic, but it’s not. It’s involuntary. And always in the spring I get transported to that time again for moments. What else do I associate with those days? Tom and I both smoked nonfilter cigarettes, a pack or two a day. A pack cost $0.35 or so. He tended to get Gauloises, while I smoked Lucky Strikes. Sometimes we’d need to roll our own from $0.15 packages of Top or Bugler loose tobacco. Our apartments were bare; we sat on the floor a lot. He mostly wore corduroy jeans or baggy white housepainter’s pants, and those big brown wingtip shoes that had been typical in boarding school. We had a lot of T-shirts, including some with horizontal stripes; often they were frayed. We never wore anything ironed. My clothes were a slightly more various mix because I’d had a little financial help from Patty (I even had a suit, a kind of mod one) and I liked to dress fairly deliberately. I’d sometimes find and buy a shirt or pants that had a style I liked because it reminded me of cowboys, or the early Rolling Stones, or Dylan Thomas, or a private eye.
Tom had an old tobacco sunburst flattop Gibson acoustic guitar he’d mess around on for hours most days. He also liked to draw cartoons and wavery shapes and write down little lines of goofiness in notebooks. I kept journals and notebooks. There were always
spiral-bound lined-paper notebooks lying around where we lived. We both had cheap portable record players and a few records. Nearly all of what few possessions we had came from the trash and from thrift stores and junk stores and used-book stores.
We were partial to odd little shops run by people who were interested in their own merchandise, the way used-book dealers like Mr. Sackin were. There was a store called Sindoori that we both loved. We always referred to its owner as Sindoori, though eventually we learned that his name was Mr. Green, Peter Green. He imported odds and ends from India, directly, traveling there to find merchandise. When we first discovered his store, it occupied a spacious ground floor on Second Avenue across from St. Mark’s Church. As the East Village became more busy, he was forced to move to smaller and smaller rooms further and further from the center of the neighborhood. He was a dignified, quiet, wry, slightly plump white guy, Jewish presumably, in glasses and a kurta, observant amid the inexpensive incense, shirts, pants, and sandals, kohl, Hindu statuettes, religious tracts, jewelry, soap, and brass or carved-and-painted exotic art-trinkets that stuffed the shop. After the place’d moved a couple of times, his latest tiny storefront was so packed there was literally room only for him and at most two skinny others to stand just inside the door among the tottering stacks and overfull shelves. The shop smelled musty and sweet. Everything came in fantastic packaging—crude, matte, colorful, heavily filigreed in calligraphic Indian lettering, all frontier homemade seeming, like the back pages’ columns of minuscule advertisements in old pulp magazines; faded and dusty and individual. These things hadn’t been expected to get to the United States. They were Eastern; the room was an alley in Bombay.
Tom bought incense there. His favorite was called Heena Agarbatti and came in a foot-long ornately shield-and-curlicue-decorated paper-covered cylindrical cardboard package with a metal cap. He’d burn a stick on his peeling-paint windowsill. Twenty years later I was astonished to discover Sindoori still existed when I chanced on it again in a cubbyhole storefront just one block east of me on Twelfth Street. Mr. Green recognized me immediately and also asked after the friend I was always with. I bought a container of the Heena Agarbatti.
Back in my sunlit living room I burned a stick of that incense, disoriented by the mixture of that day with ones two decades before. I felt incongruous, like a big broken-off piece of furniture or an empty package, mechanically shuttled, as if I was a carnival ride, jerkily but not—because the violence wasn’t felt by the rider constituted as the rigid vehicle—across the choppy waves of interim existence to that different time. It was not possible to grasp what was taking place, because I was as much a function of it as I was its observer, but it was very great.
Those days were lush and intense, even though I was frustrated and starved and uncertain. I was open to experience and excited about my own abilities. I was unknown, not publicly respected, but I knew I could see clearly, that I had vision, and I loved the certain poems and songs and cartoons I’d found in those years that were my fetishes and that supported me intellectually and aesthetically and psychologically, along with a particular few of my own ideas and experiences. I was envious of and felt competitive with others who’d already accomplished things, who seemed to be able to express themselves better than me, but I didn’t feel inferior to them. I was full of initiative and I was sure I could make happen what I wanted to make happen. I thought that my sensibility was subtle and complex, that it was interesting, and that what excited me in the things I loved existed inside me and that I could find ways to translate that into works that would be as beautiful and thrilling as I wanted.
It was Theresa Stern who first gave me what I regarded as indisputable evidence of this, and it was at this time, when we were both twenty-one, that Tom and I invented her. After we wrote that first “Ode to Mr. Sackin” poem, we kept writing poems together, usually late at night. It’s what we did instead of watch TV (we didn’t own one) when we were talked out and not wrapped up in reading. For me, it was stimulating. I liked doing it and it gave me thoughts and ideas. I liked the poems too.
We both favored a certain type of surrealist poem—good examples of which had been written by César Vallejo and Bill Knott, for instance—the surrealism of which wasn’t purely irrational, but was based in conscious thoughts and feelings and perceptions, while still acknowledging that experience precedes thought, precedes any organization, and is funny. The original, for me, of this was Lautréamont’s Maldoror. Les Chants de Maldoror was written from 1868 to 1869, when its author, French/Argentine Isidore Ducasse—pen name Le Comte de Lautréamont—was twenty-two to twenty-three. Ducasse died in Paris a year after that, by suicide it’s speculated. The book is a rhapsody of evil, of antiromance, reveling in the voice of aggressive disgust with and opposition to life, opposition to all sentimentality and received corny humanist ideas—while still somehow in the service to beauty, in a language and imagery and conceptual framework forced into being by the demands of its new worldview, setting the precedent for surrealism. It’s so extreme that it’s as funny as it is shocking. Maldoror inspired me above all other works for its demonstration of the possibilities of writing, for the way it bypasses convention to speak directly from wild unfiltered vision.
Knott was our most immediate model since he was American and near to our age (about eight years older than us). His first book had come out in 1968, and, so far, all his books had been perfect—delirious in a way consistent with the present, inspired by roots surrealism, they were fully thought-through funny word packs of imagery and ideas of: loneliness, desperate love, shock and fury at general hypocrisy and greed, and pain at American politics and warmongering. Knott was probably the strongest influence on Theresa, but she was more cynically hopeless and mocking than him.
It didn’t take many of our collaborations for me to start seeing their potential. Writing collaboratively freed me from inhibitions, and the poems were unlike what we wrote separately, while having a consistent style. I thought they would make a good book, and it would be fun to conceive it as the work of a separate third person. Tom was OK with this idea. He suggested making her a woman. Feminism and androgyny and transvestitism were in the air (Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, the National Organization for Women). We’d cash in! I started imagining her biography.
Tom was passive about where this went. He could never admit to caring about much that didn’t originate with him and often treated anything not in his specific realm as being trivial, even contemptible. This could be maddening, but at the same time I knew the directions I wanted to go with the idea and preferred to be left alone to do it. Tom did usually defer to me as a writer, even if his ego conflicted with that sometimes.
Writing the poems was so much fun. Night after night we’d be up late with maybe a quart of beer, or a fresh-scooped pint of vanilla ice cream from Gem Spa, in Tom’s bare rooms, smoking cigarettes and passing the typewriter back and forth.
Tom would get pissed off by the way I’d sabotage a line he’d just written, or when I’d go obnoxious and antipoetic. For instance, to a short poem the fifth line of which, written by Tom, went, “How perfect! I sit in the Holy Fire!” I added, “and in the bowl—alphabet shit, spelling THERESA.” I can’t remember who wrote which of the previous four lines. The full poem went like this:
Though human “hands” are scissors
it’s not a question of perception
but of prehistoric love.
I’m immortal: too lazy for this planet.
How perfect! I sit in the Holy Fire! and
in the bowl—
alphabet shit, spelling THERESA
I called her Theresa Stern with the idea that she had a German Jewish father and a Puerto Rican–American mother (the ethnic/national roots of my father and the largely underprivileged class of my mother), and that she was stern. She came from Hoboken, New Jersey.
Tom and I had once or twice taken day trips to Hoboken, across the Hudson from New York, just out of curiosity—partly be
cause Frank Sinatra came from there—and we liked the place. At that time it was really run-down. It had been a busy port but was neglected and crumbling by then. The abandoned waterfront was overgrown and there were dark rows of derelict piers sticking way out into the water, weighed down by huge decrepit warehouses into which ships’ cargoes had once been unloaded. These giant storage sheds were littered with rusty equipment and refuse, like the mammoth mounds of grainy white powder that filled one we explored. Years of stone-throwing trespassers Her components . . . had splintered the tiny grids of windowpanes up near the roofs of the buildings. Once we flushed out a covey of transvestites in the half dark.
Theresa looked a bit hard
So Theresa was a hooker who lived in Hoboken.
I arranged for a friend I’d met at an office job, Charlotte Deutsch, to take pictures for the author’s headshot. I got her to put identical makeup on Tom and me, we took turns wearing a big black wig, and she shot us each from exactly the same distance and angle so I could superimpose the negatives for the portrait. Theresa looked a bit hard but unashamed.