Sputnik, Twentieth-Century Boy

Back at Bard for my last semester before I transfer to Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village. DuPrey flunked out! Now he’s working in the kitchen and staying with his girlfriend, Sheryl.

Records

The Academy in Peril, John Cale

Filles de Kilimanjaro, Miles Davis

Nefertiti, Miles Davis

Earthspan, Incredible String Band

Aladdin Sane, David Bowie

For Your Pleasure, Roxy Music

Raw Power, Stooges

Urban Spaceman, Bonzo Dog Band

Led Zeppelin 5

I want to be a movie actor so I can get my screen life mixed up with my real life and can’t even remember who Duncan Hannah is anymore.

When I was about twelve I wrote J. Edgar Hoover a letter explaining that I wanted to be a G-man. He wrote a personal letter back, told me what a fine young lad I was, signed with a big flourish from his fountain pen. I’ve had a change of heart since then.

NYC with Eric Li, math wizard, the ching-chong-chinaman (his words). We get loaded and go see Free and Traffic at the Academy of Music. Walk through the lights of the city. Bought some English imports, Bowie tickets, corned beef sandwiches. We eat street hot dogs for thirty-five cents, they pop when you bite into them. They’re made out of rat noses or something.

Down to the Mercer Arts Center for a Valentine’s Day party featuring the New York Dolls. Also featured are Wayne County, Eric Emerson, and Suicide. It’s like watching the birth of a wildly frantic and perverse new subculture, bordering on mass transvestitism. Where do all these kids come from, with their teased hair, their gold lamé, their plastic charm bracelets, their dyed rabbit’s feet, and their cap pistols in studded holsters? “Trash, pick it up!” sings David Jo. At five-thirty a.m. we went to the after-party in Jungle Red Hair Salon, filled with painted ladies of both sexes, platinum blondes with black roots, and everybody preened in the endless mirrors.

Staying at Eric’s dorm at Columbia. I salute Athena in her corroded brass throne on the steps of the library. Down into the graffitied subways (where a sad soul recently committed suicide) eating cashews on the way to the Whitney Biennial. My mind conducts a process of elimination, discriminating between what’s good and bad. Then we pay five dollars for a ninety-minute hard-on induced by the much lauded Deep Throat.

Reading

Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet

A Man and a Maid, Anon.

Maurice, E. M. Forster

My Life and Loves, Frank Harris

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan

Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

Pan, Knut Hamsun

Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, Brigid Brophy

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence

I received a letter from my mom today. A pair of pink silk panties fell out of the envelope. Mom writes, “Speaking of Deep Throat, I found the enclosed item under your bed. Perhaps you can return it to its rightful owner, poor thing, whoever she is.” Does she say “poor thing” because the owner is going around without any underwear or because she had the misfortune to meet me?

My painting teacher, Murray Reich (a color field painter), studies my new Diebenkorn-influenced painting. He talks about Matisse’s affinity for the color blue. “You have a natural handling for paint, and terrific taste,” he tells me in confidence. Except I’m drawn to the Pre–Raphaelites, like Millais, Gérôme, Burne-Jones. That’s bad, he says. I feel lazy when I think how good Schiele was at my age. Then I think how much better I am than most of my contemporaries. It’s all relative. I feel the pull both ways. A set of contradictions. I scored 590 on my English SAT test, 550 in math. That’s not so hot.

Movies

More (1968)

Joy House

Shadow of the Thin Man

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

The Assassination of Trotsky

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Chloe in the Afternoon

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

This Man Must Die

A Fistful of Dollars

Breathless (again)

Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me

The Day of the Jackal

Leave a party on Girard to go to Sutton’s, the friendly gay bar where a guy like me won’t get beat up, with irritable Lainie and cute Claire who has pink, green, silver, and black curly hair. We found $110 in crisp bills in the parking lot. The girls are shrieking with delight. We dance and drink and go home and Lainie is determined not to succumb to my advances, is affecting anger at me, but it doesn’t take much to change that. After the lights go out the fun begins. She begins to smolder. She’s as lovely and passionate as ever. In fact, insatiable.

Back at Bard, I’m sitting in the dining commons, and a dopey freshman comes up to the table crying. “What’s the matter?” I say.

“Look, he hasn’t made a good painting in decades. It’s all been schlock. He believed in his own genius too much. Didn’t edit himself, just pure self-indulgence. What happened to him, did he choke on his own ego?”

“Fuck you,” she said, and wandered off to find some sympathetic mourners who fall for Pablo’s hype hook, line, and sinker…

I’m flunking Medieval Art class, I thought it was gonna be knights and stuff, but it’s about buttresses and boring tapestries. Not my bag. I find it almost impossible to learn things I’m not interested in. But today I painted for twelve hours, my mouth watering the whole time. It’s a continuous struggle to incorporate good drawing with good painting.

The Hurricane Boys come visit me at school. We drink beer by the waterfall. Down to the city in an old Rambler, where we go to the top of the Empire State Building. We walk along Fourteenth Street past nail salons, soul brothers, multicolor Afro-fright-wig shops. Then Kenny’s Castaways with petulant Kristian Hoffman, who’s Lance Loud’s best friend from Santa Barbara. The Dolls are playing loud and sloppy. The Hurricane Boys got thrown out for being rowdy, so we got a cab up to Columbia to crash at Eric Li’s. We had a bottle of Duncan’s Scotch, the cheapest there is. Delivers the hangover before the high. Derangement set in.

Moderation evaluation by my art teachers (Matt Phillips, Murray Reich, Jim Sullivan, Jake Grossberg), whereby they assess my progress at the halfway point of my Bard education. I laid out six canvases, some drawings, twenty-five slides. They said…I had great vitality, a great sense of design and composition. Jake said that I am, and will be, an artist and occasionally make very beautiful paintings. My hand is consistent. My work meanders through style and quality. I don’t do follow-ups. They say by painting a de Kooning–esque nude, and then a television set, I cancel myself out.

I replied that I was curious, open-minded, and only twenty years old. We all start out by aping somebody.

They said, “Yes, but it looks like you see something you like and then say, “I wonder if I could do that,” and then you do, to prove to yourself and others that you can. It’s a waste of energy.”

Phillips said (puffing on his pipe) that I have a crappy high-school hangover, with a tendency towards illustration (dirty word around here). He said I needed a world view, a stance towards the universe. “Do you think that anything you do is good? Huh?”

I had asked them what I would do upon graduation and they said bartend, drive a cab, construction. All that for my $24,000 education. “Why don’t I just work as an illustrator?”

They shook their heads in woe. “You have the capability to be a good third-generation abstract expressionist. Don’t fuck it up.”

“I don’t think that’s me.” They’re mad because I’m leaving. I want to learn to paint like Manet, if only to reject it later on. If I move into abstraction, I want it to be through the gateway of representation.

Masturbation on Campus. Last year Lloyd Bosca and I quietly crawled up a fire escape to peek at mysterious oddball W.S., a nerdy giant who would return to his room after dinner every night, lie on his bed, start playing solitaire, then get out a pot of Vaseline and his enormous schlong and begin masturbating, all the while playing cards! I swear to god. Very Diane Arbus.

Then there’s D.G., who DuPrey discovered in downstairs men’s room of the library, masturbating to his reflection in the mirror with a plastic bag over his head.

I was failing anthropology, but was told I could get a C if I wrote a paper, which I put off until the night before it was due. So, with the help of a bottle of Pernod, I wrote an extemporaneous paper called “The Masturbatory Cycles of Monkeys,” fully illustrated with drawings of the onanist monkey’s expressions at the moment of orgasm. The teacher wrote at the bottom, “Very funny, Mr. Hannah.” (In fact, I was failing everything, but Nixon pulled an aggressive move in Vietnam, and the antiwar movement amped up. We were told if our demonstration activities conflicted with our studies, we could write a note to the dean saying so, and we’d be given a C for all our courses, which I did. Lucky break for me.)

One night I was sitting in Adolph’s bar at two a.m. with Cy Davies, a junkie whose dad is a famous Washington, DC newscaster. I’m dressed up as a biker: my new motorcycle jacket, a greasy quiff, jeans, biker boots, maybe a little rouge. We were quite well oiled, talking about the Boston Strangler, when who should stomp in but three members of the Kingston chapter of the Hells Angels. Uh-oh, I thought. Wrong time to be dressed as a biker. They surveyed the place, then their eyes landed on me. “Look what we got here! This cat looks like a faggot!” Another said, “Yah, he do look like a faggot!” With that, they hoisted me up and punched me in the face.

The biker dropped me back into my chair and directed his attention to scrawny ol’ Davies.

Davies follows him out through the side door and finds a .45 automatic aimed at his forehead.

“No, sir,” says Davies, white as a sheet. He turns and goes back in, hides behind the bar with Adolph, who’s calling the police. The bikers took off with a roar of Harleys.

Down to the city with DuPrey to see King Crimson at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. Many of their fans are stumbling around on Quaaludes. The band was lit by blinding silver light, like the Blitz, expertly executing their colossal science-fiction psychodrama like a pack of deadly lab technicians. I gripped the arms of my seat in terror.

There’s a freshman dance major named Jordan. Very pretty. Very clean, like a Swiss miss. Big gray Madonna eyes. She has a half-moon smile, crooked teeth, lustrous light-brown hair. She wears a delicate gold cross around her neck. All the lesbians are crazy about her. At closing time at Adolph’s one night, we’re all about to leave. “I like you, you know,” I say to her casually. “Yes, I know,” she says. “Are you still going out with Crystal?” I ask. “Not anymore,” she says, smiling. “Then why don’t you come home with me?” I ask. “Okay, I will.” She’s got an old green Triumph convertible with Jesus on the dash, smells like old leather. Drives us back to my little room. Candles. Undress. Urgent mouth. A lithe dancer’s body, the curve of her stomach all toned and smooth. Beautiful breasts, with areolas that were the same color as her unpainted lips. Is this falling in love? We press close and look each other in the eyes. We get horizontal, a nudging cunnilingus, she tastes like the sea, she clasps my hard-on, she says “Don’t come in me.” “I won’t.” The gush from the cap of my cock arches over her taut torso to her breasts, filling up her belly button with liquid life. We’re sticky and happy, listening to “The Girl from Ipanema.” Entranced with our delicious secret.

So begins a new liaison, forged in lust, absorbed with each other’s bodies and minds. She has a bottle of Quaaludes, which only make me fall down stairs, but then, I’m always drunk. I take nude pictures of her, underneath the posters of Jesus she’s got on her wall in her sunny room in Manor House. I don’t understand the Jesus thing, it’s a first for me, but her faith doesn’t seem to inhibit her carnality one bit. She dreams of Nijinsky. We hunt for a cat under the covers, only find each other. I did some ink drawings of her pretty vagina, very carefully, really looking hard. She’s very acquiescent.

Goodbye, Bard College. You were good to me. I learned a lot, in a roundabout way.