Adrift in New York, Twentieth-Century Boy

In the cab on the way home from JFK the radio newsman says Sid Vicious is in jail, being held for the murder of Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea Hotel last night. Welcome home. I remember my one run-in with her. I was going to visit Kristian and Lance. She lived in their building. A stripper and a junkie. We got in the elevator together in the lobby. As the doors closed she asked if I was going to visit those guys. Yes. She asked if I had any drugs? No. She said I was cute and offered me a blow job. “Not today, thanks,” I said. I didn’t even know who she was. When I got to Lance’s apartment, I told him about my ride with his skanky peroxided neighbor. “Ha ha ha, you’ve just met Nancy Spungen. It’s not the first time she’s propositioned one of our visitors. She’s a pest!” He thought this all very funny. The trick is to live as if you’re going to die, and then not die. Didn’t work out that way for Nancy.

Our Italian subletters had trashed our apartment. Plus run up a $515 long-distance phone bill. Ugh. At least Kuku the cat is okay.

Books

Piracy, Michael Arlen

The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham

Those Who Walk Away, Patricia Highsmith

The Human Factor, Graham Greene

The Honorary Consul, Graham Greene

Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow

Vanity of Duluoz, Jack Kerouac

Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin

Exiles, Michael J. Arlen

The Flying Dutchman, Michael Arlen

Truffaut/Hitchcock

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

Without Stopping, Paul Bowles

Tristessa, Jack Kerouac

Exile’s Return, Malcolm Cowley

My Name Is Archer, Ross Macdonald

The Tremor of Forgery, Patricia Highsmith

The Paris Diary and The New York Diary, Ned Rorem

The Green Man, Kingsley Amis

I stop at Terry’s on my way home from a night of drinking downtown. She’s with a client, so I sit in the “waiting room” of the straight whorehouse down the hall, run by the same mobsters who operate the torture chamber. Eight women per shift. No décor to speak of. We might as well be in a doctor’s office. The girls are friendly enough, offer me a drink. Not particularly attractive. Gaudy getups. They’re talking about who cocked their pussies last. They get fifty dollars an hour. They yawn. They smoke.

Terry comes in, with a whopping wad of cash from tonight’s slaves. She doesn’t have sex with her johns, far from it. She messes with their sick psyches. I don’t know how she can do it. She’s not exactly a testament to sanity herself. I fear this will push her over the edge. It has to take its toll on her. How could it not? What about karma? But you know what they say about people who live in glass houses…I’m not exactly a saint myself. I’m fucked up! We get a cab home. Terry reads her tarot cards. She is studying the occult. White magick, she says. What if she gets black by accident? Summon a demon by mistake?

In my dreams I write books. Literally. Then I read them. They’re not bad. I was reading one in my dream, and marveling at the beautiful prose when Doc Bray appeared at my apartment door. I let him in, and told him that I’d just been reading something so lyrical! How amazing it was, the brain, to be able to write, then read, all in a dream! “I can still see it,” and closed my eyes and read aloud the after-image of the text. When I finished, I said, “Pretty good, huh?”

“Yah, and it always was, too. That’s the last paragraph of Moby-Dick, you dope.”

“But I’ve never read Moby-Dick! How could it get into my brain?” He didn’t believe me, but I checked in a bookstore later, and sure enough, those were the words I saw. Where did they come from? Who else is using my brain?

Doc Bray called Crosby a “foolish dirt mound.” That’s an insult I’ve never heard. One day he and I were mooching around Brooks Brothers, and I looked at the person across from me, sorting through men’s pajamas. Brown watch cap, brown overcoat, slacks, brogues. A woman. I recognized something in the eyes and mouth. GARBO! I played it cool, and somehow we all drifted into the elevator, Doc Bray too. That most private of all retired film stars bowed her head. I gently gave Doc a kick in the shin as we rode up to the third floor. I gave him a sign with my eyes as to the third of our grouping.

“What is it with you?” Doc said. At three Garbo made a speedy exit, knowing her cover was blown, at least for one of us. She was gone.

New Paintings

Maurice Ravel

Paul Bowles

Harry’s Bar

Kuku’s Garage

On the Channel

Pascin in the Rotonde

The Ghost of 61st Street

The Haunted Bookshop

Ned Rorem

Archery

The Girl With the Flaxen Hair

New Movies

Diabolique

The Wages of Fear

Violette

Remember My Name

Cabaret

Days of Heaven

Apocalypse Now

The Shining

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Céline and Julie Go Boating

New Records

Chairs Missing, Wire

Manifesto, Roxy Music

The Rascals’ Greatest Hits

Goodbye and Hello, Tim Buckley

The Lodger, David Bowie

Hot Rats, Frank Zappa

Preludes, Debussy

See You at the Fair, Ben Webster

Desmond Blue, Paul Desmond

E.S.P., Miles Davis

Seven Steps to Heaven, Miles Davis

Blues and the Abstract Truth, Oliver Nelson

Something Cool, June Christy

Lionheart, Kate Bush

Film premiere of Elaine: A Story of Lost Love at One Sheridan Square. J. Hoberman writes, “Andrew Horn and John Meaney have adapted a de Maupassant story into a well-crafted, if precious, vehicle for Black-Eyed Susan and other luminaries of the Ridiculous Theater Company.” With Adam McAdam, Lisa Jane Persky, and me. Showing with Still Moving—Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, Joan’s Face by Barry Shill, and Tarzam by Rudy Burckhardt (starring Taylor Mead). Showtime at 11 p.m. $2.75. It was black-and-white but tinted with colors.

A work of art needs a set of rules. In an avant-garde world the real risk might be in being a neoconservative. Sometimes painting is a form of wishful thinking. Escapism. A way to balance out an irrational world. I’m interested in an art that lasts.

I walked down to the only rock club in my neighborhood, Hurrah. Run by impresario Jim Fouratt. Tonight there was a kerfuffle, because dim bulb Sid Vicious, who’s out on bail, had a brief altercation with Patti Smith’s brother, Todd, and in no time at all he cut Todd’s cheek open with a broken glass, narrowly missing his eye. There was screaming and shouting and overturned stools and cops. I was thinking, if this is punk, forget it. Stupid, mindless posturing from a sodden moron. Back to Rikers for Sid. I walked back home.

Jean Seberg dead at forty. She was found in a car in Paris with a bottle of barbiturates. She’d been undergoing psychiatric treatment. The FBI had been hassling her.

I went to a Brassaï photography show at Marlborough and the man himself was sitting alone in a corner. Big, bulging eyes. Also Matisse drawing show at the Guggenheim.

I have a new friend, Bart Gorin from Chicago. Came to New York to be a hustler. Best friends with Ray Johnson. They go down to the Anvil every night. He is very funny and debonair in a rumpled-preppy kind of way. I go over to his apartment on Seventy-second Street to watch a cable TV show called TV Party hosted by Glenn O’Brien. It’s like a new-wave version of Playboy After Dark. Glenn loves Hugh Hefner. Who doesn’t?

Also Jimmy DeSana, a diminutive photographer I met through the FILE magazine crowd. He had a famous image of himself hanging by the neck naked (with an erection). His boyfriend is Robert Stefanotti, who has a Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Jimmy lives on Sixth Avenue. Cruises in Bryant Park at night for cutthroat Puerto Rican boys. Jimmy is quiet and droll, and likes to go to parties with me. He looks a little like Tyrone Power. He hardly drinks.

My body is trying to kill me. My heartbeat jars my vision. The jangle of my own blood is in my ears.

We’ve got a beautiful new kitten called Lucien. He’s gray and white, and Kuku is in love with him. So am I. Nothing like a kitten to bring a smile to your face. He is chronically unemployed. Loses interest fast. Hired and fired with a switch of the tail.

Terry went to DC to visit her (separated) parents. I laid in some supplies. I went to the New York magazine Xmas party and checked my new brown tweed herringbone topcoat from Brooks Brothers (gift from Dad). I had several drinks, wandering around the desks, thinking about office parties I’d seen in the movies (e.g., The Apartment). I said Merry Christmas to Mayor Ed Koch. “How am I doing?” was his stock reply. I had to get downtown to Tier 3, so looked for my coat. I found one that might’ve been it, so put it on and took the train down to West Broadway, where X from Los Angeles was playing. Gordon Stevenson is married to singer Exene’s sister, Mireille, so I was introduced to Exene and frontman John Doe. Exene came on to me in a catlike way, telling me she and her husband, John, had an “understanding.” She must’ve smelled the doom in me. Some girls are attracted to beauty in ruins like moths to a flame. It’s a kind of bad chemistry. I didn’t fancy the idea and took my drunken leave.

I must’ve overshot on the subway, because I couldn’t find my apartment building. They all looked alike to me. It was snowing pretty hard, and I was running out of gas, so I stopped in one that vaguely resembled mine and pushed the elevator button. The doorman said, “Hey, where ya goin’?”

“Hey! You can’t sleep there! Get outta here right now before I call the cops!”

I collected myself, cursing the inhumanity of the world, and stepped back out into the blizzard. By some miracle, I did find my apartment building, and took the elevator to the second floor, dug in my coat pocket for the key. No key! Wrong coat! Fuck! I had a bright idea: the laundry room was on my floor, and there was an empty closet that I might tuck into for the night! I wandered in, and sure enough, there was just the spot for my drunken slumber. I closed the door behind me and settled on the dirty floor. Zzzzzz.

In the morning I awoke in my dark chamber to the sound of a nice yuppie couple doing their laundry. Hmmm, what to do? I listened to their gay repartee, presuming themselves alone. Ten minutes went by. Only one way out. I stood up, brushed some dust kittens off my gray flannel suit, straightened my fedora, and entered the brightly lit room. They stood back, horrified. I tipped my hat, and said “Good morning” and sauntered out. That’s a scene they won’t soon forget.

I did a job with M. & Co. (25 West Thirty-ninth)—Tibor Kalman and Carol Bokuniewicz—for Paragon sporting-goods store. Pretty awful. Then they borrowed my collage book and did a record cover for the Stones. A collage. Coincidence? Maybe not. I did spots for High Times, CBS Records, lots of New York magazine. Still living below the poverty level. But it’s moving. Stasis is the enemy.

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More Books

Ghost Story, Peter Straub

Mysteries, Knut Hamsun

Our Mother’s House, Julian Gloag

Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote

The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien

The Girl with the Green Eyes, Edna O’Brien

Spy Story, Len Deighton

The Disenchanted, Budd Schulberg

The Pat Hobby Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Big Knockover, Dashiell Hammett

New Work, Joe Brainard

Selected Work, Joe Brainard

Le Chat, Colette

The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West

The Snow Was Black, Georges Simenon

The Deer Park, Norman Mailer

The Final Diary, Ned Rorem

Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

Beyond the New Wave, an exhibition of representational paintings at Club 57, 57 St. Mark’s Place. It was the brainchild of McDermott, who brought in a couple other painters. We rented the kooky nightclub for the night from almond-eyed Ann Magnuson, for a hundred dollars. We were hoping to lure real art dealers from SoHo or Fifty-seventh Street, so we could start being real painters. I showed eleven paintings, the most expensive being the Twin Gynecologists at $750. McDermott pulled out a couple days before, because we vetoed some screwball idea he had. I said it was a democracy. This inflamed him. He said, “Who cares about painting anyway, I don’t!” and left with a slamming of the door. He thought us losers should all be grateful to be under the wing of a genius P. T. Barnum–type entrepreneur, such as he. Edward Brzezinski enlisted a second-generation New York school poet, Tim Dlugos, from Washington, DC, to write an essay for our Insty-Print program. He bought one of my pictures, called The Second Ghost Painting ($500). We invited all our friends.

Ray Johnson came, smelling of Acqua di Selva. Bart in a cowboy hat (Black Bart). Painter Frank Moore. Joe Brainard. Blond appropriationist Sarah Charlesworth. Howard Read from Robert Miller. The East Village Eye. Betsy Sussler. Kathy Acker. Amos Poe.

So much of contemporary art seems like empty things for empty people. Clichés aren’t clichés if you happen to believe in them. I use the New York Picture Library for illustration, and also for my “personal” work. Nothing like poring through folders full of pictures to get the imagination going. Images that trigger the mind in different directions. Staircases, viaducts, embankments, motorboats, mirrors, curtains, subways, a kind of visual free association. I spend a lot of time in there, accumulating a stack of mounted pictures that I’ll check out and ponder for a couple weeks. A representational painter needs subject matters dear to him, or at least challenging. “What could I do with that? Maybe incorporate that thing that Hopper does?” Plus, I can travel through the ages, not restricted by “today,” which I’m not aesthetically sold on anyhow. Free to roam. Walking in others’ footsteps to see how it feels, how it fits. The endless collective image bank crying out for reinterpretation. A vast resource of raw material. It’s a great way of honing my sensibilities. Fine-tuning my antennae.

One of my themes is a dream of Europe. Not necessarily the way it is, but the way it existed in my mind before I had a handle on it. I remember when I was ten and seeing it for the first time, how everything seemed foreign, even the gas stations and airports, things that were familiar yet alien at the same time. I know this, I don’t know this. Forced me to look harder, which is what separates painters from civilians. So I’d ask myself questions. What is the visual information that is unsettling me? What’s different? What is the essence of “old Europe,” of “foreignness”? What might that look like? How could you add the atmosphere of a thriller to a cityscape without painting like a pulp illustrator? How to suggest psychological tension without any actually being enacted? How does “love” look?

Big Picasso show opens at MoMA. Love the early work. Rose period. Saltimbanques. Sloppy neoclassicism. Before he began to believe in his own myth.

Saw the Pretenders at the Academy of Music. What a sound. They tore it up! Proper rock stars.

Went to a loft party at Vito Acconci’s with writer Judy Lopatin. We were drunk on cheap red wine. It was dark and loud. Who should enter, most incongruously, but French film idol Jean-Pierre Aumont (Lili) and his naughty daughter Tina (Partner). Looking like a couple. So glamorous. Checking out New York’s underground. Judy and I retired to a corner to make out.

“I hope that before the no-wavers disappear into some irresistible sewer someone decides to make a film in which there is some tension between the camera and its subject: The Mudd Club à la Late Visconti.”

—SoHo Weekly News

New joint opened at 77 White Street in TriBeCa, called the Mudd Club. Situated in a narrow industrial street, with deserted alleyways. Very noir. Darkness stained with light. Inside, a whole new crop of arty kids getting high. Hard-up artists being good to their mad little sins. Second-string literary figures in their mucked-up finery. Mr. Miltown and the Cognac Cowboy burying their faces in fumes. Doing them good by doing them in. A gaggle of ugly girls in majorette boots ashamed of being unhappy. New boys at large looking for hot monkey love. A climate of narcotics. A neurosis in the air mistaken for energy. The new pissiness.

Saw a fresh new band from Athens, Georgia, called the B-52’s. The singer wore a seersucker jacket and white bucks like he was going to a southern country-club dance. Pencil mustache. The girls had beehive hairdos and satin prom dresses. The crowd of aspiring whatevers loved them. Dancing to their single, “Rock Lobster.” Afterwards we had chocolate egg creams and cheeseburgers at the brightly lit Dave’s Luncheonette on Canal Street.

We’ve been running into the new bohemians as they settle into this new scene that’s unfolding at the Mudd. Cookie Mueller, gorgeous Anna Schroeder, pale Wendy Whitelaw, William Coupon, Kirsten Bates, Edo, Maripol, Kate Simon, Bobby Grossman, Stephen Mueller, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marcus Leatherdale, Claudia Summers, Anita Sarko, Stephen Saban, David Armstrong, Lisa Stroud, Glenn O’Brien, Tina L’Hotsky, Hal Ludacer, Gordon Stevenson, James Chance, Lisa Rosen, James Nares, the Lurie brothers (John and Evan), Duncan Smith, Haoui Montaug, David Rattray, and Dr. Mudd himself, Steve Mass. All regulars at this den of iniquity. They go night after night and the night after that. Terry and I even brought director Jerzy Skolimowski down there. We loved his new film The Shout (with Alan Bates and Susannah York). We’d interviewed him in his hotel suite for the SoHo News. Funny to see a European intellectual survey this decadent scene with gravitas. Rubbing his chin and casting his eyes left and right.

Saw the Cramps play the Mudd, and Bockris and I went down to the basement dressing room. They were ghoulish and sweaty, and Lux Interior made a running dive, catapulted over the back of the couch, and landed on his head on the cement floor. Knocked himself unconscious. Poison Ivy looked on uninterestedly. These guys are hard-core.

New Films

Gloria

Lou Lou

Every Man for Himself

Stardust Memories

Peppermint Soda

Terry and I go over to Kathy Acker’s East Village apartment, which is full of books. She’s one of the most passionate readers I’ve ever met. I don’t really care for her work, sadly, but I certainly like her. Totally lively, funny, nonjudgmental character. She used to perform in live sex shows on Times Square. We talk about Scottish author Alexander Trocchi, and she lends me several out-of-print editions.

Kathy and her current boyfriend, Jeff Goldberg (who’s writing a book on opium called Flowers in the Blood), invite me and Terry up to Bard for a reading she’s giving. Not a good idea, because I’ve been on a long, exhausting bender. It’s kind of like having the flu. Never sober and yet always hungover. Totally in the grips of John Barleycorn. I have to let nature take its course. I would be hard pressed to describe a bender at this point in my life as “fun.” But we go nonetheless, get on the train in my beautiful caramel-colored tweed Cerutti suit and small valise full of vodka bottles. The Hudson whooshes past. We arrive at the Manor House for the reading, which is straight out of an old English drawing-room murder movie, and we’re sitting in back as Kathy reads. I begin to flip out. I start heckling Kathy. She laughs and has some fast comebacks for me. The students shush me. The English teachers are angry. The only person who doesn’t mind is Kathy herself! She thinks it’s theater! Bless her.

The next chapter of this blackout finds me alone and lost on the campus roads, under the dark brown sky, perforated with stars. The dark so dark it had motion. Security discovered me ranting to no one in a ditch in a horizontal position. When I stood up my pants fell down. Bit of slapstick humor thrown in for good measure. How ignoble! I was returned to the room we were given, Terry was hearing voices in her head, and she stabbed me in the chest with a small penknife she keeps in her bag. The little blade bounced off a bone. A searing bulb of pain. Ouch! This because the voices were teasing her about my so-called “harem.”

“Terry, there is no harem!” But the voices insisted. I couldn’t talk her down.

Back at the NY Public Library, atoning for my sins. Looking up files on attics, the sides of ships, tunnels, movie theaters, burglars, military schools, gates, garages, poplars, lion tamers. I’m gonna try painting with spiritual butter. The trick is to keep on wanting something.

“Duncan had his telescope out, spying on Manhattan,” said Terry. One day we’re walking up Fifth Avenue, and Terry pops into Charles Jourdan. Yoko Ono is trying on boots. John Lennon is sitting next to her, in slouch hat, leather jacket, and blue jeans. A Beatle! He looks up at me, the ghost of a smile crosses his face. I give a tiny nod. Terry’s oblivious to all this. She asks my opinion on a pair of boots in a stroppy voice. Then John does smile, because we’re in the same boat, out shopping with our headstrong lady friends. Yoko asks him a question and the connection is broken.

Jimmy DeSana had a party at his loft by Bryant Park. Big sweaty crowd. I was talking to tall, gaunt photographer Peter Hujar about Marcus Leatherdale. Peter said, “His name sounds like a retirement home for leather queens.” Indeed, Marcus looks like he was created by Tom of Finland. Upstairs neighbor Keith Haring is there. He asked me to visit his studio a month ago, and I saw his black-and-white graffiti drawings of dogs and babys. I thought, This poor guy doesn’t have a chance. But of course I didn’t say that, I told him it all looked good. Sweet, awkward guy. Meanwhile, jazz-funkster James Chance gets into a fistfight with someone much bigger than him. The crowd backs up as they fall to the floor slugging. James is getting pounded, now bleeding. It happens at almost every party I go to. James must have a pugilist nature. He always loses. Always got a black eye on the boil. He’s got a nice pompadour, and looks good in his lamé Vegas getups, fronting James White and the Blacks. Terry’s gonna be on the cover of his Buy LP in a skimpy blue bikini designed by James’s girlfriend, Anya Phillips, part of the new-wave dominatrix circle.

Meanwhile, as the party gets noisier and noisier, I’m getting quite pissed, as is my wont to do. I need to use the john, but there’s a long line, and whoever’s in there is in no hurry to come out. Sex? Drugs? Death? I can’t hold it any longer, so go to a secluded window that I think opens on to an airshaft. I aim and let loose a golden shower. Ahhhhh, that’s better. I zip up and go back into the fray. Just then, photographer Francesco Scavullo storms in, enraged. He’d been leaving the party when suddenly a stream of pee rained down on his trademark black fedora. “Who did it?!” he demands of Jimmy. “Who?!” Scavullo has never had such an indignity perpetrated on him in his entire life! He’s livid! Jimmy doesn’t know, but he has a pretty good idea, and apologizes profusely for whichever of his disgusting guests urinated on his hat.

Jimmy calls me in the morning to ask if I happened to pee out his window last night. I confess, and he scolds me in his mild way. I secretly find it very funny. Peeing on Scavullo’s hat? What a capital idea!

Terry smiles in this knickerless lunar night. Her mouth is full of stars. Irish nudity in repose, muddy white. Breasts palely touched with freckles. Schoolgirl skin. Rabbit ears folded back. Two eyes roaming. A tiny moist mushroom rises from her ginger-haired triangle and says…hello! I put an index finger in her pleat. Cunt like cashmere. I rise above her starfish body, take her in and take her out. We’re deep divers. We’re sunken ships. She was streaming, she was undoing everywhere, singing from her loins. Head flung to the side. We are alone in the whispering wet dark.

I’ll walk out of here tomorrow, and it’ll be New York. “Everything screwy is normal in this damn town,” I’ll think to myself. I’ll pass Verdi Square, where the time and temperature is on the old Central Savings Bank. Crossing Amsterdam. Crossing Broadway. Past cornices and colonnades. I’ll walk down to the river shimmering with snakes of light, in the shadow of approaching rain. I’ll look at the jumble of colored smudges, and the sunset over the Palisades ablaze with crimson and gold. Better today, better tomorrow.

Terry did a reading upstairs at the Mudd Club with the legendary Lester Bangs. She went on first, and was reading a piece on the etiquette of a slave to his dominatrix. It had appeared in the new issue of BOMB, illustrated by me. It got pretty gnarly. Lester was very drunk and stoned on barbs, sitting in the front row, and he began to groan. Terry paused politely, then continued with her text. Lester lurched to his feet and stumbled towards her, paused, and then careened to her left, collapsing behind a screen. We wouldn’t be hearing from him again tonight. He was gone. People fall apart all the time.

Every day the mailbox is stuffed with invitations to various events. We went to a white-tie party for Giorgio Armani at Studio 54, the elegant playground for the international jet set. There was fake snow, fashion models, pulsing music. There was Truman Capote hanging over the light booth, transfixed by the dance floor, pinned on prescription drugs. He looked like a waxwork from Madame Tussauds. A zombie. We wandered from catwalk to balcony, viewing the spectacle. Danced to Chic’s “Good Times,” an oddly melancholic song. As if there were no good times. Said hi to Andy and Bianca, took in the fevered scene in the unisex lavatories. We walked home in our fancy dress like a couple of Cinderellas, Terry’s ice-blue floor-length gown trailing behind her. I say “C’mon, Clarabell.”

Did a job on children’s friendships for Self magazine at Alexander Liberman’s request. I loved his book on artists’ studios. They paid me $600. Another on botulism for New York magazine for $300. One for Rolling Stone on the pinball game Space Invaders. Another for Esquire ($300). Essence. National Lampoon ($2,000). It gets easier.