The last weekend of the summer I went home to visit my parents. I walked to Port Authority feeling optimistic as I boarded the bus to South Jersey, looking forward to seeing my family and going to secondhand bookstores in Mullica Hill. We were all book lovers and I usually found something to resell in the city. I found a first edition of Doctor Martino signed by William Faulkner.
The atmosphere at my parents’ house was uncharacteristically bleak. My brother was about to enlist in the Navy, and my mother, though intensely patriotic, was distraught at the prospect of Todd being shipped off to Vietnam. My father was deeply disturbed by the My Lai massacre. “Man’s inhumanity to man,” he would say, quoting Robert Burns. I watched him plant a weeping willow in the backyard. It seemed to symbolize his sorrow for the direction our country had taken.
Later people would say the murder at the Altamont Stones concert in December marked the end of the idealism of the sixties. For me it punctuated the duality of the summer of 1969, Woodstock and the Manson cult, our masked ball of confusion.
Robert and I rose early. We had put aside money for our second anniversary. I had prepared our clothing the night before, washing our things in the sink. He squeezed out the excess water, as his hands were stronger, and draped the clothes over the iron headboard we used as a clothesline. In order to dress for the occasion, he disassembled the piece in which he had stretched two black T-shirts on a vertical frame. I had sold the Faulkner book and, along with a week’s rent, was able to buy Robert a Borsalino hat at the JJ Hat Center on Fifth Avenue. It was a fedora and I watched him comb his hair and try it on in different ways before the mirror. He was obviously pleased as he jokingly pranced around in his anniversary hat.
He put the book I was reading, my sweater, his cigarettes, and a bottle of cream soda in a white sack. He didn’t mind carrying it, because it lent him a sailor’s air. We boarded the F train and rode to the end of the line.
I always loved the ride to Coney Island. Just the idea that you could go to the ocean via subway was so magical. I was deeply absorbed in a biography of Crazy Horse when I snapped to the present and looked at Robert. He was like a character in Brighton Rock in his forties-style hat, black net T-shirt, and huaraches.
We pulled into our stop. I leapt to my feet, filled with the anticipation of a child, slipping the book back into the sack. He took my hand.
Nothing was more wonderful to me than Coney Island with its gritty innocence. It was our kind of place: the fading arcades, the peeling signs of bygone days, cotton candy and Kewpie dolls on a stick, dressed in feathers and glittering top hats. We wandered through the last gasp of the sideshows. They had lost their luster, though they still touted such human oddities as the donkey-faced boy, the alligator man, and the three-legged girl. Robert found the world of freaks fascinating, though of late he was forgoing them for leather boys in his work.
We strolled the boardwalk and got our picture taken by an old man with a box camera. We had to wait for an hour for it to be developed, so we went to the end of the long fishing pier where there was a shack that served coffee and hot chocolate. Pictures of Jesus, President Kennedy, and the astronauts were taped to the wall behind the register. It was one of my favorite places and I would often daydream of getting a job there and living in one of the old tenement buildings across from Nathan’s.
All along the pier young boys and their grandfathers were crabbing. They’d slide raw chicken as bait in a small cage on a rope and hurl it over the side. The pier was swept away in a big storm in the eighties but Nathan’s, which was Robert’s favorite place, remained. Normally we only had money for one hot dog and a Coke. He would eat most of the dog and I most of the sauerkraut. But that day we had enough money for two of everything. We walked across the beach to say hello to the ocean, and I sang him the song “Coney Island Baby” by the Excellents. He wrote our names in the sand.
We were just ourselves that day, without a care. It was our good fortune that this moment in time was frozen in a box camera. It was our first real New York portrait. Who we were. Only weeks before we had been at the bottom, but our blue star, as Robert called it, was rising. We boarded the F train for the long ride back, returned to our little room, and cleared off the bed, happy to be together.
Harry and Robert and I sat in a booth at the El Quixote sharing shrimp and green-sauce appetizers, talking about the word magic. Robert would often use it to describe us, about a successful poem or drawing, and ultimately in choosing a photograph on a contact sheet. “That’s the one with the magic,” he would say.
Harry, feeding into Robert’s fascination with Aleister Crowley, was claiming to have been fathered by the black magician. I asked if we drew a pentagram on the table, could he make his dad appear? Peggy, who had joined us, brought us all down to earth. “Can any of you second-class wizards conjure the dough to pay for the check?”
I can’t exactly say what Peggy did. I know she had a job at the Museum of Modern Art. We used to joke that she and I were the only officially employed people at the hotel. Peggy was a kind, fun-loving woman with a tight ponytail, dark eyes, and a worn tan, who seemed to know everybody. She had a mole between her brows that Allen Ginsberg had dubbed her third eye, and could easily have been a fringe player in a beatnik movie. We made quite a crew, all talking at once, contradicting and sparring, a cacophony of affectionate arguing.
Robert and I didn’t fight very often. He seldom raised his voice, but if he was angry you could see it in his eyes, his brow, or the stiffening of his jaw. When we had a problem that needed hashing out, we went to the “bad doughnut shop” on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. It was the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin’ Donuts. The coffee was burnt, the doughnuts were stale, but you could count on it being open all night. We felt less confined there than in our room and nobody bothered us. All kinds of characters could be found at any given hour, guys on the nod, hookers on the night shift, transients and transvestites. One could enter this atmosphere unnoticed, inspiring at the most a brief glance.
Robert always had a powdered jelly doughnut and I had a French cruller. For some reason they were five cents more than normal doughnuts. Every time I ordered one he’d say, “Patti! You don’t really like them; you’re just being difficult. You just want them because they’re French.” Robert tagged them “poet’s cruller.”
It was Harry who settled the etymology of the cruller. It wasn’t French at all, but Dutch: a fluted ring-shaped affair made from choux pastry with a light and airy texture eaten on Shrove Tuesday. They were made with all the eggs, butter, and sugar forbidden at Lent. I declared it the holy doughnut. “Now we know why the doughnut has a hole.” Harry thought for a moment, and then scolded me, feigning annoyance. “No, no, it’s Dutch,” he said. “It doesn’t translate that way.” Holy or not, the French confection connection was permanently squelched.
One evening Harry and Peggy invited us to visit with the composer George Kleinsinger, who had a suite of rooms at the Chelsea. I was always reluctant to visit people, especially grown-ups. But Harry lured me with the information that George had written the music to Archy and Mehitabel, a cartoon tale of the friendship between a cockroach and an alley cat. Kleinsinger’s rooms were more tropical forest than hotel residence, a real Anna Kavan setup. The draw was supposed to be his collection of exotic snakes, including a twelve-foot python. Robert seemed transfixed by them, but I was terrified.
As everyone was taking turns petting the python, I was free to rummage through George’s musical compositions, stacked randomly among the ferns, palms, and caged nightingales. I was elated to find original sheet music from Shinbone Alley in a pile atop a filing cabinet. But the real revelation was finding evidence that this modest and kindly snake-rearing gentleman was none other than the composer of the music for Tubby the Tuba. He confirmed this fact and I nearly wept when he showed me original scores for the music so beloved in my childhood.
The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone,
with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson’s grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C. Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes on Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have much money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums.
I loved this place, its shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively. There were rumors of Oscar Wilde’s trunks languishing in the hull of the oft-flooded basement. Here Dylan Thomas, submerged in poetry and alcohol, spent his last hours. Thomas Wolfe plowed through hundreds of pages of manuscript that formed You Can’t Go Home Again. Bob Dylan composed “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” on our floor, and a speeding Edie Sedgwick was said to have set her room on fire while gluing on her thick false eyelashes by candlelight.
So many had written, conversed, and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here. I sniffed out their spirits as I silently scurried from floor to floor, longing for discourse with a gone procession of smoking caterpillars.
Harry zeroed in on me with his mock, menacing stare. I started laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because it tickles.”
“You can feel that?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Fascinating!”
Occasionally Robert entered the game. Harry would try to stare him down, saying things like, “Your eyes are incredibly green!” A staring match could last for several minutes, but Robert’s stoic side always won out. Harry would never admit Robert won. He would just break away and finish a previous conversation as if the staring match never occurred. Robert would flash a knowing smile, obviously pleased.
Harry was taken with Robert but wound up with me. Often I called on Harry on my own. All his Seminole Indian skirts with delicate patchwork would be lying about. He was very particular about them, and seemed delighted to see me wear them, although he would not let me touch his hand-painted Ukrainian egg collection. He handled the eggs like they were tiny infants. They had intricate patterns akin to the skirts. He did let me play with his magic wand collection, intricately carved shaman wands wrapped in newspapers. Most were about eighteen inches long, but my favorite was the smallest, the size of a conductor’s wand, with the patina of an old rosary rubbed smooth from prayer.
Harry and I spieled simultaneously on alchemy and Charlie Patton. He was slowly piecing together hours of footage for his mystery film project based on Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. None of us knew exactly what it was but sooner or later we were all summoned to serve in its lengthy inception. He played tapes of peyote rituals of the Kiowa and songs of the common folk of West Virginia. I felt a kinship with their voices and, so inspired, made up a song and sang it to him before it dissipated into the musty air of his cluttered room.
We talked about everything, ranging from the tree of life to the pituitary gland. Most of my knowledge was intuitive. I had a flexible imagination and was always ready for a game that we would play. Harry would test me with a question. The answer had to be a sliver of knowledge expanding into a lie composed of facts.
“What are you eating?”
“Kidney beans.”
“Why are you eating them?”
“To piss off Pythagoras.”
“Under the stars?”
“Out of the circle.”
It would begin simply and we would keep it going for as long as it took to get to the punch line, somewhere between a limerick and a poem, unless I tripped up and used an inappropriate reference. Harry never made mistakes, as he seemed to know something about everything, the undisputed king of information manipulation.
Harry was also an expert at string figures. If he was in a good mood he would pull a loop of string several feet long from his pocket and weave a star, a female spirit, or a one-man cat’s cradle. We all sat at his feet in the lobby like amazed children watching as his deft fingers produced evocative patterns by twisting and knotting the loop. He documented string figure patterns and their symbolic importance in hundreds of pages of notes. Harry would regale us with this precious information that regrettably none of us would grasp, as we were so mesmerized by his sleight of hand.
One time, when I was sitting in the lobby reading The Golden Bough, Harry noticed I had a beat-up two-volume first edition. He insisted we go on an expedition to Samuel Weiser’s to bask in the proximity of the preferred and vastly expanded third edition. Weiser’s harbored the greatest selection of books on esoteric matters in the city. I agreed to go if he and Robert didn’t get stoned, as the combination of the three of us in the outside world, in an occult bookstore, was lethal enough.
Harry knew the Weiser brothers quite well and I was given the key to a glass case to examine the famous 1955 edition of The Golden Bough, which consisted of thirteen heavy green volumes with evocative titles like The Corn Spirit and The Scapegoat. Harry disappeared into some antechamber with Mr. Weiser, most likely to decipher some mystical manuscript. Robert was reading Diary of a Drug Fiend.
It seemed like we milled around in there for hours. Harry was gone for a long time, and we found him standing, as though transfixed, in the center of the main floor. We watched him for quite a while but he never moved. Finally, Robert, perplexed, went up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
Harry gazed at him with the eyes of an enchanted goat. “I’m reading,” he said.
We met a lot of intriguing people at the Chelsea but somehow when I close my eyes to think of them, Harry is always the first person I see. Perhaps because he was the first person we met. But more likely because it was a magic period, and Harry believed in magic.
Robert’s great wish was to break into the world that surrounded Andy Warhol, though he had no desire to be part of his stable or to star in his movies. Robert often said he knew Andy’s game, and felt that if he could talk to him, Andy would recognize him as an equal. Although I believed he merited an audience with Andy, I felt any significant dialogue with him was unlikely, for Andy was like an eel, perfectly able to slither from any meaningful confrontation.
This mission led us to the city’s Bermuda Triangle: Brownie’s, Max’s Kansas City, and the Factory, all located within walking distance of one another. The Factory had moved from its original location on Forty-seventh Street to 33 Union Square. Brownie’s was a health food restaurant around the corner where the Warhol people ate lunch, and Max’s where they spent their nights.
Sandy Daley first accompanied us to Max’s, as we were too intimidated to go by ourselves. We didn’t know the rules and Sandy served as an elegantly dispassionate guide. The politics at Max’s were very similar to high school, except the popular people were not the cheerleaders or football heroes and the prom queen would most certainly be a he, dressed as a she, knowing more about being a she than most she’s.
Max’s Kansas City was on Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue South. It was supposedly a restaurant, though few of us actually had the money to eat there. The owner, Mickey Ruskin, was notoriously artist-friendly, even offering a free cocktail-hour buffet for those with the price of a drink. It was said that this buffet, which included Buffalo wings, kept a lot of struggling artists and drag queens alive. I never frequented it as I was working and Robert, who didn’t drink, was too proud to go.
There was a big black-and-white awning flanked by a bigger sign announcing that you were about to enter Max’s Kansas City. It was casual and sparse, adorned with large abstract pieces of art given to Mickey by artists who ran up supernatural bar tabs. Everything, save the white walls, was red: booths, tablecloths, napkins. Even their signature chickpeas were served in little red bowls.
The big draw was surf and turf: steak and lobster. The back room, bathed in red light, was Robert’s objective, and the definitive target was the legendary round table that still harbored the rose-colored aura of the absent silver king.
On our first visit we only made it as far as the front section. We sat in a booth and split a salad and ate the inedible chickpeas. Robert and Sandy ordered Cokes. I had a coffee. The place was fairly dead. Sandy had experienced Max’s at the time when it was the social hub of the subterranean universe, when Andy Warhol passively reigned over the round table with his charismatic ermine queen, Edie Sedgwick. The ladies-in-waiting were beautiful, and the circulating knights were the likes of Ondine, Donald Lyons, Rauschenberg, Dalí, Billy Name, Lichtenstein, Gerard Malanga, and John Chamberlain. In recent memory the round table had seated such royalty as Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, Nico, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Viva, and the Velvet Underground. It was as darkly glamorous as one could wish for. But running through the primary artery, the thing that ultimately accelerated their world and then took them down, was speed. Amphetamine magnified their paranoia, robbed some of their innate powers, drained their confidence, and ravaged their beauty.
Andy Warhol was no longer there, nor was his high court. Andy didn’t go out as much since Valerie Solanas shot him, but it was also likely he had become characteristically bored. Despite his absence, in the fall of 1969 it was still the place to go. The back room was the haven for those desiring the keys to Andy’s second silver kingdom, often described more as a place of commerce than of art.
Our Max’s debut was uneventful and we splurged on a taxi home for Sandy’s sake. It was raining and we did not wish to see the hem of her long black dress trail in the mud.
For a while the three of us continued to go to Max’s together. Sandy had no emotional investment in these excursions and served as a buffer to my sullen, restless behavior. Eventually I fell in line and accepted the Max’s thing as a Robert-related routine. I came home from Scribner’s after seven and we’d eat grilled cheese sandwiches at a diner. Robert and I would tell each other tales of our day and share any new work we had accomplished. Then there would be the long stretch of figuring out what to wear to Max’s.