Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Two
NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...
At age fourteen, I had walked into the offices of The World Ontological Organ with my Music and Art high school friend, Danny, looking for supplies for our literary magazine, Neuk, walked out, told Danny to wait a second, then went back asking for a summer job because I had been running away from home by tiny steps for five years. A rare double major at M&A, painting and violin, and with high hopes, now I had thought to make my escape by one large leap, and I felt ready for that big break.
Danny became part of my past. I hardly remember what he looks like today. I was a rocket and he was a spectator.
How did I get that job? Understand, I hadn’t lied to do it. That came after. No, this was another in a sequence of little miracles in my life, wonderful happenstances following me around as though I had a fairy godmother blessing me continuously.
And today I am worthless. Where is Danny? I don’t know. He might be dead. But I speculate he is a success somewhere and happy. He was shy and sweet and morose, but I’ll bet he grew out of the worst parts of that. Growing into himself. Having found his true nature and discovered his bliss, just like Joseph Campbell said he should. And I walked out on him that way a dad walks out to get a pack of smokes. Wanting to be somewhere else. Someone else.
To get what? Here it was. Philip and I were tasked with cleaning up the large, dark back room after paste-up night, and Benny, the editor, his father, had a visitor along the empty corridors in the front offices.
I had been up most of the night, working and learning what I could about the graphics side while doing my grunt chores of running to Ratner’s for coffee and donuts, sweeping up the drops and dregs along the floors and glass tables of the cartoonists and paste-up artists, and keeping the rubber cement bottles full. Benny sent me out to buy coffee for his guest. When I came back the visitor had gone to the bathroom.
Benny pulled me down by my shoulder and said, in his no-longer-thick-at-all Czech-Israeli accent by-way-of-London, “When this guy leaves I want you and Philip to follow him.”
“Why?”
“Do what the fuck I am telling you, wiseass. Follow him and you will learn something. Maybe. Stay about a block behind him. Follow him and watch.” He let loose, and I bounced up.
I walked out of his office, returned to the back room and continued to help Philip clean, relaying his father’s instruction. He stopped working, gave me that stupid, concave smile, that choked up, chortled, hunched over, coughing laugh, making that bony, inherited frame twist at an odd angle. You would watch, as with his father, standing there, wondering when he would fall over. Fourteen and he had smoked enough cigarettes and weed to develop this cough. Like his father at forty-two. Unlike me, Philip had no goals except to get high and have as good a time as possible. And get laid. Finally.
We sat up front at an empty secretary’s desk, in the hushed mood of post-pasteup day, playing with paper clips and rubber bands until Raymond, the visitor who wore a dirt-darkened, copper-toned London Fog raincoat, with a huge, dark stain on the back, on this sweltering, garbage-stinking, New York City August day, left Benny’s editor’s office. We were deadpan when he exited down the stairwell, then leapt up to run after him on this, our journey of Sentimental Education.
He started up Second Avenue. He was a moderately trim man, a bit heavier than Benny’s rather bony frame, with slicked back, curly hair like Benny, middle-aged and thinning on the pate like Benny, gold-rimmed glasses like Benny, but not sun-shaded like Philly’s old man. Somewhat handsome like Benny, less because his cheekbones sagged a bit more and he was not as swarthy, with thicker features. He kept his hands in the pockets of that London Fog, whipping around him on the windier corners. He didn’t walk too quickly down the street. Occasionally he would shift from side to side, not because an object or anyone was blocking his path, although there were plenty of people on the steaming sidewalk in the late afternoon.
Philip asked me, “What are we looking for?”
Were we looking for something? “Your guess. Benny said follow him, we follow him.”
We turned west on Saint Mark’s Place, around the newsstand at Jem’s Spa, and Raymond’s gait never changed. The crowd thickened momentarily, he weaved through it, and now the weaving became more intentional, his head turned once in a while. Here and there his head dipped in and I was certain I saw him speak.
“Did he say something?” I asked.
“To who?”
“That girl.”
“Which one?”
“The blonde.”
“The one in the jeans or the one in the miniskirt?”
“The one in the miniskirt.”
Philip shrugged.
By the time we’d reached Broadway he’d done this four times with four women of various varieties and, although slowing down, never stopped walking, never missed a beat, turning his head, talking. He crossed the street and, in front of the Union, he dipped in to a girl, brown ponytail, maybe mid-twenties, mostly nice-looking but homely, carrying two notebooks close to her chest. She replied, and he stopped. We stopped. He spoke to her again. She spoke to him. They turned away together. We followed. They kept walking until they reached an alley and turned into it. We hesitated. I knew that alley and I knew it was shallow, narrow. It turned into another dead-end. I couldn’t see how far they’d walked into it.
I pulled on Philip’s shirt. “Hang up here. I can’t see.”
“Let’s keep walking,” Philip said. “Dad said we should follow.”
“Let’s wait. I don’t know if we should. Philly, this is stupid.”
“Dad said we should follow.” We shared a quick laugh. We walked, reached the head of the alley and looked in. Raymond had the girl pinned. Her legs were up in the air. The two of them were throbbing on the wall like tree ear fungus in a stiff breeze. We pulled back.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Philip said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”
We walked back half a block and waited. Fresh in our minds the incident with Chico a few weeks before. Benny had told us to follow him, too. We'd squeezed into the doorway of the B&H Dairy Restaurant, and staying there, in itself, had been quite a task. Chico, our staff cartoonist, had walked out to the corner of Saint Mark’s and Second, stood there eating an ice cream cone he’d bought at Jem’s Spa, sticking it out to the young women who walked by, and saying something. Ultimately, he walked off with one to his pad. Later we were told the few skimpy details of that monologue, a "secret" Benny knew, when we returned to the office.
“Is it us?” I asked Philip. “Is this some… Is there some… There must be some… There are words… They are saying something. There are…. There must be something beside the words. There has to be.” Philip looked at me. His mouth was open and there was an expectation in his eyes, assuming I possessed a secret he didn’t, the initial steps to an unknown code I had begun to break. He waited for me to speak more coherently than in the past, to explain it to. I will never forget that look because Philip was my closest friend and while he didn’t have the ugliest face I’ve ever seen, he had one of the strangest noses ever. It sticks out. Poor Philip. Not bad otherwise, though. And he would have his way with women, later. Although, poor Philip.
“I have got to know this secret,” he said.
“But whatever it is, Philly, following him around won’t help.”
“So, fuck, is that it?”
I felt badly for him. Another urgency pressed upon me. “No, let’s wait and see what happens next. Benny told us to follow him. Perhaps...” I knew it wasn’t true, but, perhaps.
No more than four or five minutes passed. Raymond and his paramour came out of the alley that led from the alley. They didn’t shake hands and parted ways.
“Fuck me,” came hissing from Philip’s general direction.
Raymond continued to head west on 8th Street. The dipping continued, weaving through the pedestrians, bobbing his head in and out, saying magical words to women in an attempt to have sex with them, and, yes, before he hit Sixth Avenue, he claimed a second encounter and discovered another secluded spot for his rendezvous. Clearly he knew all these locations by heart. And Benny knew this pattern, which was why he presumed upon us to follow Raymond and, what? Learn by his example? Be amused by this exhibition? What was the profound lesson in this? A cautionary tale? Some larger message? How did Benny discover the detail of this habit? Had Raymond shared this guilty secret? Had Benny himself followed Raymond? Horrors, had he joined his friend once?
We followed Raymond further on into Greenwich Village, meandering through the growing crowds. Businesses let their workers out for the evening. More people began groping their way into the district for music and drugs, familiarity and comradery. Raymond was nodding to women young, middle aged, now a few older women, the nighttime perusers and shoppers. It appeared his appetites, ever sated, were growing larger.
By the time he reached the old village, around Hudson Street, he became attached to an older woman, slender, silver gray, but genuinely attractive. We waited, resting outdoors at the coffee shop owned by Philip’s godfather, John. We marveled at Raymond’s staying power, the fact that while he did not last long in each individual instance he was able apparently to recuperate rather quickly. Raymond continued his trek west towards the river. There, at the river itself, he had his final conquest—for our consumption—a chubby young man.
Dusk fell, and we were tired and unhappy. We had been on this journey too long. It was hot and darkly humid. The other end of the streets past where the district closed, where the monotonous hummings of the West Side Highway could be heard and the river smells began to fill the air in the heat were too much for me. The East Village beckoned, with its welcoming pierogi and where we could be done with the night. We were not dressed to walk through the West Village at night, handsome young boys with long curly hair in tight, flashy day clothes. I wore what turned out to be see-thru white jeans when sweaty damp in the shady light of lampposts, and a sheer red shirt with a large white star print, open almost to the waist. And a white satin bandana. Philip wore buckskin pants and a leather vest with no shirt. We drew whistles down every lane until we crossed back to the east side of Broadway and the comfort of drunks in doorways.
I didn’t see the point of this long excursion. I felt one realization creeping up on me. I had been sleeping around—as in sleeping sleeping—at the WOO office, at Benny’s, at Tony and Bonnie’s, saving up money. Chico didn’t have sex on the street. Time to find my own apartment. But Benny wasn’t sending me an eviction notice. Was there a message in all this or was it another of Benny’s “here-kid-grow-up” tricks? Later, when I realized he was teaching us how to follow and observe, as he had been taught when a young reporter, I wondered if he was also trying to extend a lesson on morality or one about Debordian lived experience. He asked us later what happened, knowing. He laughed his laugh, coughing it up while smoking a joint and several Negritos over coffee.
I did, later, ask about Raymond and he told me he’d been kicked out of the State Department some years before on a morals charge. We never discovered what Raymond had been saying to those “conquests.”
I never understood Benny was also teaching me how to be a detective until I became one. I let the knowledge sleep for a while. You know, that big sleep.
But the idea of investigation built into me by other means. I was greatly affected by reading The New Yorker when I was young. From the cartoons to the Florsheim shoe ads, each week I was inspired by one tidbit after another to become a writer, more inspiration than I received from anything else in my environment. Don’t mistake me. I love writers of books. I have a problem with books themselves. It was the contemporariness of magazines, and The New Yorker especially, the fact that it wasn’t a book. I love books, but, frankly, I prefer to collect them rather than read them. This has been my problem for a long time with books, that they are too removed from the moment. Much like rich people. Magazines are more in the moment. Daily newspapers, although more in the moment, the quality of their writing is dreadful, overall. The internet is worse.
A greater difficulty developed. Because I was young and naïve the magazine writers themselves became for me people who were inspired and were themselves inspirational. When I began meeting them, and by the time I was fourteen I met them frequently, they took on a genuine aura between gold and sepia. They existed in an atmosphere of sainthood, drifting through the world at a different pace, and when they spoke I never heard their words because they came to me through a kind of fourth dimensional telecommunication, a veiled mind reading, not that I was a special receptor, but that it seemed such writers, when you were in their presence, sent out these messages and you were blessed to receive them. I hadn’t begun taking psychedelic drugs, yet, so that could not account for the sensation. This feeling, if it could be thought of as a mere feeling, intensified for me regarding the female writers I met. I wanted very much to possess them, a sensation I did not experience with male writers. Thankfully. For me, I mean. No disrespect meant to those of you of different persuasions. But I wanted yet more to be like them, a presence of mind that superseded the sexual.
Strong metaphysical impressions may be transparent, brief, or emotional. They linger, however. Reverberate. Come back to you. Over and over. Unheimlich…
Charles, the first to hire me at WOO, had been a self-taught, self-directed painter for many years. Harry a poet of minor renown and a teacher at City University. They introduced me to Benny, the editor in chief, because he too would have me working. Benny, an emigre from war, a participant in war, and formerly a reporter for the Associated Press in England. They all knew anyone who was anyone in the art and political underground, locally and elsewhere. And there was not a corrupt sinew between them. For a fleeting time they were my idols.
Benny had me under his wings. Yes, I said wings. He constantly weighed me down to the ground with a ton of bricks. Sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, running constantly to fetch coffee or once a week to the Diamond District to buy his favorite tobaccos at Sherman’s.
I performed my duties like a saint. Part-time or not, since it was summer I spent most of my days there. The staff believed I was an eighteen-year old college freshman at City, interning for Harry, mostly, because I told this lie to anyone who would listen, and it seemed they were listening when they weren’t. And I told it because I wanted to learn from them every aspect of the business.
When I arrived, Blade was copy boy. I didn’t want Blade’s job. I felt it was beneath me and complained about it while I was helping Phil to clean the toilets. I wanted to be a pasteup artist, one of the people who put the newspaper together, proudly watching those cardboard sheets piled carefully in a big box and sent off with an agent to a printing plant in New Jersey—connected to the Mafia; most East Coast printers were; the distributors, too—then waiting, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes for half a day, for a stack of papers to come back, all fresh and smelly to wet our fingers on the ink, turning the pages and smiling.
Instead I was called into Benny’s office one day and he told me to run uptown to retrieve copy because Blade hadn’t shown up. That was the day I became Copy Boy, or had that work tacked on to my runner and janitorial duties. Blade was canned. Poor Blade. Nobody knew what happened to Blade. He just never showed up. But, without that moment, there never would have been Claudia. And without Claudia, I would never have followed my path, probably...
Being copy boy was an addition to my duties, not a replacement. A shifting, thankfully. The summer progressed, others were hired, the paper continued to grow. For a few months, while I learned new skills, and after I stopped sweeping floors and being the runner for coffee and donuts, Benny, Harry or Charles would send me hustling, scurrying, running around the city in all kinds of weather to pick up writer’s stories, their views, wherever they were in their turrets, their shacks, their apartments or houses around the city. I would walk, run, hop on busses, take subways, scoot on ferries. Swaddle myself on chilly days, huff and puff on the hot ones. Enduring spouses and pets and saying yes to invitations. Being a fine boy when I shouldn’t. Because the invitations were few and inviting. But once you start hearing them, if you are a fine boy, they begin to—and this wasn’t a word at the time—network.
Then you end up at a Warhol party and it smacks you in the kisser. You’ve spent a lot of time splashing in puddles. You stop splashing for a moment, you stand facing your image, lulled by all the ripples and impressions, you see your reflection. What’s happening to you? You’ve made a turn, an advancement, you’ve changed from that to this, by stretches you gained new qualities, abilities. No longer the hobbit or hooligan. Do you want to be this person? Because, if you step in this new direction you will move beyond integrating that new being into the old you, you will become that different person and not the old you, taking on…responsibility. Oh, no…maturing! Do you have a choice any longer? Time to drop away the cask of the old you with all the remnants, jettison each piece of the ancient uniform, the shell you carried with you. Reenter the world naked, new, dumb. Assuming you weren’t dumb before.
Oh. And you’ve met the love of your life, sonny boy. How about that?
This rainbow is colorful and that one is dull. Time of day, change in the weather or perspective. The pot of gold at the end isn’t always what you’d expect. Trains don’t always have a terminal point and clouds don’t always have a silver lining. Maximally consequential concerns can become little more than seat cushions upon the Great Chair of one’s life, suffering the vitals of wind and rain and wearing thin over the years. Today I live deep in the wild and wooly West, far from my native homes, homies. But once I was a Copy Boy. There I began a journey. Writer, rebel, raconteur and whatever the fuck I am today. Reminiscent of an old Sam Fuller movie, I suppose. Up hills and down hills. Especially hilly in-house years in old San Francisco before Prop 13 when the great insanity started.
But there was the day of the Claudia Dreifus Pygmalion reversal. I don’t know if she assumed I was being cute, or if that was important. But it sticks in my memory. Her response to my standing there, frozen stiff in front of her, in front of her statuesque present, was the epitome of charm and patience, smiling softly, bowing her head, turning away on one foot. The Olympia which I renamed Claudia for my own purposes. Ideal and portable typewriter. Thankfully, unlike most of the other writers I’ve met over the years, Claudia was a decent human being. Perfect, no. Who is? I never managed to move in her circles and know her too closely. Even today. I headed into the fast down lane and she, decent, rode in a steady straight line to a point in the middle lane. A trick I wouldn’t learn for a long while. Because I would begin to hang out with writers. And other artists, most of whom are necessarily insane, in their outward behaviors and in some instances all the way. But there has been and always will be that touchstone Claudia moment and there were to be several more, writers and others I’d meet who possessed integrity and who made an impression.
Reminds you of that reflection in the puddle when you had a chance to stop splashing. Catch your wind, maybe you’ve fallen down, accidentally seen your reflection and say, Oh, gosh, is that what I look like, or better, you remember, Claudia, where have I transgressed? Yes, a few Copy Boys run the way of Blade, into a ditch. A few boogie on to Woodward and Bernstein status. Or Faulkner or Flaubert. You never know. That’s life. That’s what people say…
Tony and Chico did a lot of teaching. They hired another copy boy and I moved into the paste-up spot and started to do more writing.
When he was younger, Chico had an aversion to insecure people. I was raised through rigid regimentation to be insecure. Insecurity rose in me like sap in the spring, and I had to fight it off. For a while I sat on top of a ladder in the WOO reception area. It drove the secretaries crazy at times. Worse when I climbed down from that ladder and gave them “massages.” Hey. They asked. I never forced. Chico would see me there, shake his head and walk by.
Benny and Charles sent me to Chico to learn paste-up. Not exactly his favorite moment. I was like a fly on him, hunched over the light table. He taught me the rudiments of the darkroom. I knew about art, but Chico taught me how to scrounge for it, be instinctual, rummaging through old books and magazines for “found” pieces. I knew what collage was, but he taught me how to create it. I was in art school, but while I learned the “rules,” everyone at WOO taught me how to break them. The best and worst kind of education simultaneously.
Paste up, the writing, our advertising, the basic cleaning of the bathroom in those earlier years was done with the least amount of discipline, what I needed the most and was trying to run away from constantly. The examples set for me on paste-up nights kept me convinced for more than a decade that I could survive without ever having to answer to The Man, without ever having to keep a journal or a notebook or wake up on time. Without ever having to go back home. Before working that night we all smoked grass or dropped acid, and we created this beautiful rag read by 2 million people around the country. The optimal mind blow for me.
We’d start early, five or six in the evening, and not finish until four or five the next morning, when the printer’s agent would fall through the doorway to pick up the finished pages. For years, a trip in itself, because the printer’s agent had been this stock-broker-type Irishman, nose-drunk, friend to all, but he showed up with dope for Benny or Charles from God-knows-where, probably a Mob connection. I stayed back waiting for breakfast with Benny and whomever he was meeting with at Ratner’s, or a fancier locale, and with Some Impressive People. Or catching the subway with him uptown on my way to school. When I went to school. By then Robin had gone.
When “The Prince” joined the staff he and Chico worked paste-up side by side and mumbled to each other, giggling all night long. It was fascinating to watch, and I did, with envy over the male bonding because they were both my ideal of cool. The Prince stayed with me for a while on 7th Street because he was in the middle of a divorce. He had a string of women and drugs flowing into the apartment, and that was how I managed to gather a closeness with Chico, for the first short time. How I started to get high and have random sex regularly. When the three of us were together, at his place on 11th Street or at mine, he would tell us stories about his years with the motorcycle gang or other anecdotes about his days back in Buffalo. He showed us physical shtick, fighting tricks. I was amazed, big and strong looking as he was, The Prince was so untalented in this arena. Chico practically gave us combat training in his living room.
I started drinking to mimic John and my brother when I was nine. Smoking, too. Like my father. Menthols and Dewar’s. In milk. The Dewar’s. A growing boy needs it. The milk. Not a lot. The Dewar’s. You couldn’t sneak too much in that house. People noticed. I stopped after I left home, since none was available. After all, I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was mimicking my brother’s behavior. But then I accidentally fell in with the “right crowd” at the right time. I wanted to fill in the big hole after Robin left that second time. And people kept coming up to me saying, “Try this,” and I did.
My father left home when he was nine, went to work at odd jobs until he joined the Army. Menthols and Dewar’s. That’s why he was gracious, if that’s the right word, about my leaving when I did. My mother threw half a fit. “He’ll be back with his hand out in a week,” my father said.
The time with Dan Zimmer was mostly about hobnobbing with wild members of the Mellon family, then the Gould’s, not my strain, goodness knows. Philip, Benny’s son, started flirting with another rich girl, someone from Shaker Heights, neither a Mellon nor a Gould, and all of us were involved with heroin, which happened to be trendy at the time, lucky me. There were rich people all over the place. We were also trendy. So I ran into them everywhere.
I hated needles so I didn’t use them. Dr. Schwiener, the “Jew doc” as my father called him, but who my mother insisted on, chased me around the room once with a twelve-inch syringe when I was six, then nailed me with another right in my ass while his seven-year-old daughter was standing in the doorway, watching. He was laughing out loud both times. One or the other ruined me on needles for about forty years.
I did occasional work for Dan Zimmer, who tried, if you can call it that, to network all the underground papers, as if we were starting the Associated Press or something. It was an effort encumbered most of the time by his stiffening, if you can call it that, habit of heroin use. Have I mentioned heroin? One evening, after a morbid amount of typing and phone calls, on my part, he invited me to an informal gathering.
“You’re a Gould, they’re Goulds, you should be friendly.”
“We’re not from the same stock, Dan, I guarantee it.”
“What difference? You’ll like them. You’ve hobnobbed with the rich before.”
Was it Francis Scott Key who said the rich are not like us? I guess not. The rich don’t work like the rest of us, don’t sleep or eat or vacation or gamble or have sex like the rest of us. And doing drugs would not be an exception. It isn’t. Two basic elements make using drugs problematic among the 99 percent: the acquisition of them—including the cost—but in most instances the terror involved, the paranoia about being caught, the fear of jail. The rich have no problems with either concern because their drugs are acquired for them by a safe intermediary and, in those rare instances when they may be arrested it’s like a ride at an amusement park, the trip to the police station and the process of being booked. Having to be finger-printed and talking on the phone to their lawyer. Oh, mercy, what a waste of a dime. I don’t know why they use drugs. High society’s unlimited capacity for indifference would seem to trim back the necessity for escape. Yet escape they do. Taking drugs with rich people is almost like having sex with a rubber doll. I guess people are into that. Apparently not all the rich, but, who knows…
Anyway, there I sat, wobbly, watching the trembling leaves of the Jay Gould family tree shooting up, five males, a couple of females and myself in the room with good ol’ Dan, while I took tiny toots of that nice off-white powder up my mixed-race schnoz, as I had been, off and off in the Music and Art cafeteria when I bothered to go there, where they had an ample supply, M&A located within one of New York City’s biggest heroin marketplaces. This was a polite Upper East Side crowd, not your nodding off downtown or ghetto scuz, and before long some of them were having sex with each other. I started to worry. I mean sex? Okay, but you make your own personal choices and you do it in private.
Walking the streets with a heroin buzz, even a moderate one, is not a distinctively comfortable option. In the event you don’t know. Clearly, and sadly, this was to be the case that evening, and in the dippy dark. The fact of it being a nice neighborhood—Sutton Place is rather nice—had little ameliorative effect. Once high on heroin little has additional ameliorative effect. “Don’t leave,” I heard a furtive whisper, but I didn’t care to respond, and I had no idea what creature the voice emanated from. No offense. Not my thing. But I don’t think it was Dan. Why would he miss me?
Don’t judge. Observe and avoid. If and when and to whatever extent you can. The 59th Street Bridge shone pretty that night and the park bench inviting. You could hardly smell the stink. Or know whence it came from. Up, down. East, west, north, south. Outside. Inside. At least I couldn’t. I sat for a while until I was certain not to be drooling any longer then walked downtown. Arrived at the Zum Zum on Lexington and 45th street.
And that would someday be a nice place to catch some...something. And meet several someones.
When we were bouncing ideas off each other at WOO, especially on covers, which we did a lot in 1967-69, we were remarkably simpatico at times. We were the first weekly to hit the stands with a cover on the USS Pueblo being captured by North Korea—not Time, not Newsweek—and it was my cover, but Chico hand-lettered one of the headlines for me in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t find the right one by scrounging for tchotchkes. That was the night he discovered I was sixteen. It didn’t sit comfortably with him, but it had been a long night, and it was normal not to see each other for days after. That was the period when Zimmer’s heroin crew became a substantial influence over us. Chico didn’t stop working with me, but it further strained on our relationship, one more reason for him to keep his distance, to question why he should be dealing with me outside the office. A “jail-bait” concern, added to his other sensitivities about me.
Tony was different. He and Bonnie had known about my age almost from the beginning and had adopted me as their kid brother. They contained the strangest verisimilitude to my parents, the way they sat and laughed. Tony did exactly what my father did, but he was the “right” to my father’s “wrong,” the “good” to my father’s “bad.”
As Harry and Charles spent more time on outside work, Tony took on more responsibilities in house. Finally, Charles found himself marrying a rich woman who stole him off to Taos, and that would be the last we ever saw of him. Tony took over.
I at dinner Tony and Bonnie’s apartment on 11th Street most nights. I’d helped him build his studio, helped him rebuild their apartment into a model that stood out in that ratty neighborhood. And I babysat when they wanted out.
Tony the builder and woodworker, like my father, on the side. But he was better than my father. Instead of criticizing me for what I couldn’t do, on the spot, calling me incompetent at the first misstep and yelling at me to disappear, he demanded better work of me. It was boy scout quality, building the manliness, getting the work done, team spirit. I was glad to do it, and in retrospect those were my best times, when I was most disciplined in the best sense, when I delivered my best work on the job, both in graphics and in writing, which I was ever a pipsqueak at. I wouldn’t develop any decent writing talent until much, much later. He was the same with all the staff, his gift. While we were giddily stoned, he could merrily crack the whip, everyone laughing in front of their light tables. “Avast! To work, mateys!”
In more than a vague sense, most of us were boy scouts who had reached a fork in the road and found ourselves in a place where we could do our alternative National Service or post-doctoral studies. Or, in my case, a conscientious merit badge. Tony was a perfect example and played scout master with Chico who could never be the boy scout but tried, regarding his potential “conflicts,” perhaps come to terms with his former gang life and inching away from it to a great extent. They did have a lot in common, those two, and they knew it. They looked alike in their bulky, hulking way.
That was my high point, my boy scout period. Or was it? Did I do my most or least damage then?
Then either a badge of honor or a never-ending ramification that the entire staff ended up on Nixon’s hate list. His hit-list. All of us with an FBI file, a Secret Service file, a CIA file, a Lord-knows-what file that lives on to this day. Fame. What a burden.
All right, I know what you’re saying. What am I doing spending all this time bragging about these people? Some of them are famous and maybe I’m name dropping. That’s not what it’s about.
Why should you care about it? Because I’m famous now and people want to know about famous people? No. Because life doesn’t suck. It’s weird. But it doesn’t suck. And one person’s life can teach you a lot about another. And again, why bother going through all of this? Now, when the trainwreck of this story, this bit of it, is just getting going?
And am I lying about any of this? No. I used to lie. Lying was like a Swiss Army Knife for me, but I don’t do it any longer. I don’t lie any more than your most honest person. The way normal people do. You occasionally lie to avoid violence. You buy misery with it, ultimately. Or the other way around, you buy violence to avoid misery. It’s a guessing game and a gamble or sometimes it’s a choice you make. You learn to make the choices. Or, if you’re exceptionally flawless, like truly honest people, it’s a gift. I didn’t lie by nature. If I were dishonest by nature, I’d surely be lying now. I was taught to lie. I was compelled to lie. Essentially, I was forced to lie. Not by the devil. More by circumstance. But more by the fact, at the time, that it seemed necessary, and unimportant. What difference did it make if I told this lie or that one, now or then, to this person or that person? In the end, no one would care. The lying was never excessive, mind you, and it was never fun. It was a burden for me, complicated by guilt, by the anxieties of being found out. Whenever I found it possible I told the truth. And I believed that was enough.
I searched forever. For a way to be completely honest. Just like I searched for decent parents. I’ve never stopped. That’s what it’s about. Not name dropping.
But the worst of it is that lying became a habit for me. I am a habitual person, with an addictive personality, you might say. I can control myself, but it takes an effort. I cannot allow myself to tell a lie here and there. If I do… It would be like eating an ice cream here and there or drinking a rum Collins here and there. I cannot handle it.
With exception for those dynamics determined by nature, human wrongs sit at the heart of what goes amiss, in every case. Some are your responsibility. Some, others. But everything that malfunctions has a starting point. Anyone, anyone with any sense, should be able to track it back to that point. Any malfunction, to any wrong at its starting point. You step into the flow of rivers that began with headwaters from ancient glaciers… And where do glaciers begin?
Where do they end and how?
I mean, do glaciers give a flying fuck who they hurt? They do what they do. For the longest time they don’t hurt anyone that anyone can tell. Then, BOOM, they kill all sorts of people. Don’t they? In the meantime, though, they run the straight and narrow, best they can. Straight and narrow. Best they can.
Like everything else. Everything. Unless they have some intention or natural inclination to do otherwise. Isn’t that funny? Where have we heard that before?
So. Tony was the managing editor, was about to become the publisher with Charles leaving and for some odd reason decided to make me managing editor. Why? That wonderful Pueblo cover.
Benny hated two female folk singers, both of whom he knew intimately, Judy Collins and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. He overlooked explaining the reasons in detail. It must have had to do with drugs, sex, money or a combination of the three. People are entertained, today, with little stories about the Bohemian lifestyle. They know very little of it.
Emigrating from Israel after the ’48 war and after recuperating from his war wounds, Benny had worked for the AP. Then he settled in to a storefront and apartment on top of The Gaslight in the Village where he made jewelry and ran a shop for many years. He partnered with a friend who built a small coffee import business a few blocks away and then opened a coffee shop with a roasting oven in the back. He lived there with his wife, a fashion model, his daughter, his sons, and they were babysat for by the performers downstairs, like young Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Mary Travers, and others. The trouble must have had something to do with that back then. I guess. I’ll never know.
When Benny found out I played guitar, sang, wrote music, had a fledgling band back at M&A, and that I might be interested in pursuing a career in music on the side, he set me up with an audition at Epic Records. He was spurred entirely on by the fact that Judy Collins had a protégé, coincidentally–have I mentioned coincidence?—a classmate of mine at Music and Art, Janis Fink, whom Collins had stage-named Janis Ian. At the time he had a contact, Clive Davis, an up and coming A&R man at Epic Records. Needless to say, I didn’t impress this balding, faux hippie, but, for friendship’s sake, he gave my crew a shot and then gave me a solo audition. Both duds. And deservedly so. Benny was not deterred. He arranged for me to perform at various benefit concerts around the East Village. I ended up onstage with The Lovin’ Spoonful, John Hammond Jr., The Youngbloods, The Fugs, Peggy Florence and others. Janis herself once or twice. By the way, ice between us.
But when Dan Zimmer became cozy with Steve Paul, who owned a club uptown called “The Scene,” Benny notched me a gig as “house musician.” Another great turning of Vico’s Wheel. I was sixteen, turning seventeen, if you know what I mean, but, like many others, Steve Paul didn’t know it, and his arrangement had me performing from the time the door opened until the first act came on stage, a period of 30-60 minutes. For that my pay was all I could drink.
Um, speaking of lying, you do know that you can lie to yourself as well, right? And do any of you out there recall the name “Robin”?
Before that period, I rarely drank. The toying around I had done in mimic of my father and brother I had left behind in favor of greener pastures. But, starting then, I became a heavy drinker, for brief periods. Zimmer, The Prince, and Chico were regulars at “The Scene.” This at the time The Prince roomed with me on 7th Street because he was going through his divorce. Lots of nasty talk about his soon-to-be ex. Naturally, he travelled uptown with me, in style, by cab. I made more money in those days than I knew how to spend, and was never offended by spending it on others, like The Prince, who was experiencing hard times because of that divorce.
The Prince taught me how to drink in a proper, Lithuanian manner, after a few nights of my vomiting it up. We would defer to a Greek diner across the street from the club, for a meal first, applying a food base, often with Chico, with Zimmer or others, then taking a break for food between, and applying a layer of food after. I would end up facing the asphalt up north of Times Square in the middle of the night in any event, heaving, not having to pay a bill, not having any limits, and having The Prince there to hoist me into a cab and drag me up three flights of stairs in the middle of the night.
But I was sober enough in my “house” hour and, with tradition, the house musician was invited to sit in on the first song with the opening act. I was compensated then by playing a shabby rhythm guitar innocuously in the background with Stevie Winwood and Traffic, Edgar and Johnny Winters, and with Jimi Hendrix for a minute or two and a few others. Oh, yeah, I asked him. He didn’t remember Robin’s name or anything else about her.
The drinking, the heroin and rough living played out with my falling viciously ill by early that summer. The Prince had disappeared to white dustland somewhere. Tony or Bonnie had to stop in to keep me clean and eating, to supply me with groceries. There was talk of my moving back home, which I did end up doing for a brief period a few months later, having run out of money. That’s right, girls and boys, about a year after Robin had disappeared without a word following the Easter debacle, I became too sick from drugs and drink and not eating enough to pay for my rent-controlled apartment. Me, who took care of her. But I didn’t want to lose it that roach haven.
Ah, but having to find an illegal sublet for himself, Raymond, yes that Raymond, stepped in at Benny’s suggestion. Out of the mists of time, handily at a moment’s notice.
A few weeks into that sublet, I stopped by to pick up a few books and pieces of clothing I’d left behind. When the door opened, at the hand of a handsome young stranger, I saw Raymond stretched out on Lisa’s old couch in a pair of black panties pulled down across his thighs, half zonked, staring at her beautiful, Vesuvian murals, being catered to by another young, blonde, naked muscle boy. A month later, the place was robbed and cleaned out. Raymond, presumably with muscle boys in tow, evacuated and my lease etherized.
Those murals, those beautiful paintings which truly forewarned of death as much as those they had been inspired by, were immediately painted over.
Elton John. Grand Funk Railroad. Bowie. Led Zeppelin. All Things Must Pass. And they did. I went to see Led Zeppelin at a Madison Square Garden concert. By myself. Wore those same clothes I’d worn years before when Phil and I had wandered behind Raymond in search of some mystery. Did it simply to find out if I had overcome the bloat from all the drinking and could fit back into them, look decent again. Just barely managed. That was the measure I used. Time to come back into society. Back to school. Working at the Post Office.
If there had been some deep moral lesson to be discovered from the trails of Raymond, from all that passed during those days, I have never gleaned it.
Not until now, almost fifty years later.
Perhaps, somehow, I have absorbed it through osmosis.
Wear these thoughts like a leather friendship band, mon lecteur, especially if you have not lived so long, nor lived such a life. Should they ever happen to become wet allow them to tighten around you like the arms of two loving parents. But I know this: the world has never become a better place or worse. It is what it is.
And people are who they are. They can’t become anyone else, no matter how hard they try. No matter where they go. But... It’s never too late to grow up. Nor too late to realize the work is never done.
James Baldwin, of all folks, had this problem with writers being too pedantic about their moral lessons. Too much polemic, not enough metaphor he hinted. I get it. And, you might recall, Seneca reminds us that sometimes you just have to ram crap down people’s throats?
People are who they are. People do what they do. Don’t judge them. Don’t judge yourself. Have compassion. And as much as you can spare. We aren’t here long enough for anything else. We don’t have enough time to play games.
We no longer even have enough time to learn the rules. Rules? Who needs stinkin’ rules?
I’ll tell you who. A guy named Frank Terpil. So, why did I stop here to tell you all this?
At age fourteen, I had walked into the offices of The World Ontological Organ with my Music and Art high school friend, Danny, looking for supplies for our literary magazine, Neuk, walked out, told Danny to wait a second, then went back asking for a summer job because I had been running away from home by tiny steps for five years. A rare double major at M&A, painting and violin, and with high hopes, now I had thought to make my escape by one large leap, and I felt ready for that big break.
Danny became part of my past. I hardly remember what he looks like today. I was a rocket and he was a spectator.
How did I get that job? Understand, I hadn’t lied to do it. That came after. No, this was another in a sequence of little miracles in my life, wonderful happenstances following me around as though I had a fairy godmother blessing me continuously.
And today I am worthless. Where is Danny? I don’t know. He might be dead. But I speculate he is a success somewhere and happy. He was shy and sweet and morose, but I’ll bet he grew out of the worst parts of that. Growing into himself. Having found his true nature and discovered his bliss, just like Joseph Campbell said he should. And I walked out on him that way a dad walks out to get a pack of smokes. Wanting to be somewhere else. Someone else.
To get what? Here it was. Philip and I were tasked with cleaning up the large, dark back room after paste-up night, and Benny, the editor, his father, had a visitor along the empty corridors in the front offices.
I had been up most of the night, working and learning what I could about the graphics side while doing my grunt chores of running to Ratner’s for coffee and donuts, sweeping up the drops and dregs along the floors and glass tables of the cartoonists and paste-up artists, and keeping the rubber cement bottles full. Benny sent me out to buy coffee for his guest. When I came back the visitor had gone to the bathroom.
Benny pulled me down by my shoulder and said, in his no-longer-thick-at-all Czech-Israeli accent by-way-of-London, “When this guy leaves I want you and Philip to follow him.”
“Why?”
“Do what the fuck I am telling you, wiseass. Follow him and you will learn something. Maybe. Stay about a block behind him. Follow him and watch.” He let loose, and I bounced up.
I walked out of his office, returned to the back room and continued to help Philip clean, relaying his father’s instruction. He stopped working, gave me that stupid, concave smile, that choked up, chortled, hunched over, coughing laugh, making that bony, inherited frame twist at an odd angle. You would watch, as with his father, standing there, wondering when he would fall over. Fourteen and he had smoked enough cigarettes and weed to develop this cough. Like his father at forty-two. Unlike me, Philip had no goals except to get high and have as good a time as possible. And get laid. Finally.
We sat up front at an empty secretary’s desk, in the hushed mood of post-pasteup day, playing with paper clips and rubber bands until Raymond, the visitor who wore a dirt-darkened, copper-toned London Fog raincoat, with a huge, dark stain on the back, on this sweltering, garbage-stinking, New York City August day, left Benny’s editor’s office. We were deadpan when he exited down the stairwell, then leapt up to run after him on this, our journey of Sentimental Education.
He started up Second Avenue. He was a moderately trim man, a bit heavier than Benny’s rather bony frame, with slicked back, curly hair like Benny, middle-aged and thinning on the pate like Benny, gold-rimmed glasses like Benny, but not sun-shaded like Philly’s old man. Somewhat handsome like Benny, less because his cheekbones sagged a bit more and he was not as swarthy, with thicker features. He kept his hands in the pockets of that London Fog, whipping around him on the windier corners. He didn’t walk too quickly down the street. Occasionally he would shift from side to side, not because an object or anyone was blocking his path, although there were plenty of people on the steaming sidewalk in the late afternoon.
Philip asked me, “What are we looking for?”
Were we looking for something? “Your guess. Benny said follow him, we follow him.”
We turned west on Saint Mark’s Place, around the newsstand at Jem’s Spa, and Raymond’s gait never changed. The crowd thickened momentarily, he weaved through it, and now the weaving became more intentional, his head turned once in a while. Here and there his head dipped in and I was certain I saw him speak.
“Did he say something?” I asked.
“To who?”
“That girl.”
“Which one?”
“The blonde.”
“The one in the jeans or the one in the miniskirt?”
“The one in the miniskirt.”
Philip shrugged.
By the time we’d reached Broadway he’d done this four times with four women of various varieties and, although slowing down, never stopped walking, never missed a beat, turning his head, talking. He crossed the street and, in front of the Union, he dipped in to a girl, brown ponytail, maybe mid-twenties, mostly nice-looking but homely, carrying two notebooks close to her chest. She replied, and he stopped. We stopped. He spoke to her again. She spoke to him. They turned away together. We followed. They kept walking until they reached an alley and turned into it. We hesitated. I knew that alley and I knew it was shallow, narrow. It turned into another dead-end. I couldn’t see how far they’d walked into it.
I pulled on Philip’s shirt. “Hang up here. I can’t see.”
“Let’s keep walking,” Philip said. “Dad said we should follow.”
“Let’s wait. I don’t know if we should. Philly, this is stupid.”
“Dad said we should follow.” We shared a quick laugh. We walked, reached the head of the alley and looked in. Raymond had the girl pinned. Her legs were up in the air. The two of them were throbbing on the wall like tree ear fungus in a stiff breeze. We pulled back.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Philip said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”
We walked back half a block and waited. Fresh in our minds the incident with Chico a few weeks before. Benny had told us to follow him, too. We'd squeezed into the doorway of the B&H Dairy Restaurant, and staying there, in itself, had been quite a task. Chico, our staff cartoonist, had walked out to the corner of Saint Mark’s and Second, stood there eating an ice cream cone he’d bought at Jem’s Spa, sticking it out to the young women who walked by, and saying something. Ultimately, he walked off with one to his pad. Later we were told the few skimpy details of that monologue, a "secret" Benny knew, when we returned to the office.
“Is it us?” I asked Philip. “Is this some… Is there some… There must be some… There are words… They are saying something. There are…. There must be something beside the words. There has to be.” Philip looked at me. His mouth was open and there was an expectation in his eyes, assuming I possessed a secret he didn’t, the initial steps to an unknown code I had begun to break. He waited for me to speak more coherently than in the past, to explain it to. I will never forget that look because Philip was my closest friend and while he didn’t have the ugliest face I’ve ever seen, he had one of the strangest noses ever. It sticks out. Poor Philip. Not bad otherwise, though. And he would have his way with women, later. Although, poor Philip.
“I have got to know this secret,” he said.
“But whatever it is, Philly, following him around won’t help.”
“So, fuck, is that it?”
I felt badly for him. Another urgency pressed upon me. “No, let’s wait and see what happens next. Benny told us to follow him. Perhaps...” I knew it wasn’t true, but, perhaps.
No more than four or five minutes passed. Raymond and his paramour came out of the alley that led from the alley. They didn’t shake hands and parted ways.
“Fuck me,” came hissing from Philip’s general direction.
Raymond continued to head west on 8th Street. The dipping continued, weaving through the pedestrians, bobbing his head in and out, saying magical words to women in an attempt to have sex with them, and, yes, before he hit Sixth Avenue, he claimed a second encounter and discovered another secluded spot for his rendezvous. Clearly he knew all these locations by heart. And Benny knew this pattern, which was why he presumed upon us to follow Raymond and, what? Learn by his example? Be amused by this exhibition? What was the profound lesson in this? A cautionary tale? Some larger message? How did Benny discover the detail of this habit? Had Raymond shared this guilty secret? Had Benny himself followed Raymond? Horrors, had he joined his friend once?
We followed Raymond further on into Greenwich Village, meandering through the growing crowds. Businesses let their workers out for the evening. More people began groping their way into the district for music and drugs, familiarity and comradery. Raymond was nodding to women young, middle aged, now a few older women, the nighttime perusers and shoppers. It appeared his appetites, ever sated, were growing larger.
By the time he reached the old village, around Hudson Street, he became attached to an older woman, slender, silver gray, but genuinely attractive. We waited, resting outdoors at the coffee shop owned by Philip’s godfather, John. We marveled at Raymond’s staying power, the fact that while he did not last long in each individual instance he was able apparently to recuperate rather quickly. Raymond continued his trek west towards the river. There, at the river itself, he had his final conquest—for our consumption—a chubby young man.
Dusk fell, and we were tired and unhappy. We had been on this journey too long. It was hot and darkly humid. The other end of the streets past where the district closed, where the monotonous hummings of the West Side Highway could be heard and the river smells began to fill the air in the heat were too much for me. The East Village beckoned, with its welcoming pierogi and where we could be done with the night. We were not dressed to walk through the West Village at night, handsome young boys with long curly hair in tight, flashy day clothes. I wore what turned out to be see-thru white jeans when sweaty damp in the shady light of lampposts, and a sheer red shirt with a large white star print, open almost to the waist. And a white satin bandana. Philip wore buckskin pants and a leather vest with no shirt. We drew whistles down every lane until we crossed back to the east side of Broadway and the comfort of drunks in doorways.
I didn’t see the point of this long excursion. I felt one realization creeping up on me. I had been sleeping around—as in sleeping sleeping—at the WOO office, at Benny’s, at Tony and Bonnie’s, saving up money. Chico didn’t have sex on the street. Time to find my own apartment. But Benny wasn’t sending me an eviction notice. Was there a message in all this or was it another of Benny’s “here-kid-grow-up” tricks? Later, when I realized he was teaching us how to follow and observe, as he had been taught when a young reporter, I wondered if he was also trying to extend a lesson on morality or one about Debordian lived experience. He asked us later what happened, knowing. He laughed his laugh, coughing it up while smoking a joint and several Negritos over coffee.
I did, later, ask about Raymond and he told me he’d been kicked out of the State Department some years before on a morals charge. We never discovered what Raymond had been saying to those “conquests.”
I never understood Benny was also teaching me how to be a detective until I became one. I let the knowledge sleep for a while. You know, that big sleep.
But the idea of investigation built into me by other means. I was greatly affected by reading The New Yorker when I was young. From the cartoons to the Florsheim shoe ads, each week I was inspired by one tidbit after another to become a writer, more inspiration than I received from anything else in my environment. Don’t mistake me. I love writers of books. I have a problem with books themselves. It was the contemporariness of magazines, and The New Yorker especially, the fact that it wasn’t a book. I love books, but, frankly, I prefer to collect them rather than read them. This has been my problem for a long time with books, that they are too removed from the moment. Much like rich people. Magazines are more in the moment. Daily newspapers, although more in the moment, the quality of their writing is dreadful, overall. The internet is worse.
A greater difficulty developed. Because I was young and naïve the magazine writers themselves became for me people who were inspired and were themselves inspirational. When I began meeting them, and by the time I was fourteen I met them frequently, they took on a genuine aura between gold and sepia. They existed in an atmosphere of sainthood, drifting through the world at a different pace, and when they spoke I never heard their words because they came to me through a kind of fourth dimensional telecommunication, a veiled mind reading, not that I was a special receptor, but that it seemed such writers, when you were in their presence, sent out these messages and you were blessed to receive them. I hadn’t begun taking psychedelic drugs, yet, so that could not account for the sensation. This feeling, if it could be thought of as a mere feeling, intensified for me regarding the female writers I met. I wanted very much to possess them, a sensation I did not experience with male writers. Thankfully. For me, I mean. No disrespect meant to those of you of different persuasions. But I wanted yet more to be like them, a presence of mind that superseded the sexual.
Strong metaphysical impressions may be transparent, brief, or emotional. They linger, however. Reverberate. Come back to you. Over and over. Unheimlich…
Charles, the first to hire me at WOO, had been a self-taught, self-directed painter for many years. Harry a poet of minor renown and a teacher at City University. They introduced me to Benny, the editor in chief, because he too would have me working. Benny, an emigre from war, a participant in war, and formerly a reporter for the Associated Press in England. They all knew anyone who was anyone in the art and political underground, locally and elsewhere. And there was not a corrupt sinew between them. For a fleeting time they were my idols.
Benny had me under his wings. Yes, I said wings. He constantly weighed me down to the ground with a ton of bricks. Sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, running constantly to fetch coffee or once a week to the Diamond District to buy his favorite tobaccos at Sherman’s.
I performed my duties like a saint. Part-time or not, since it was summer I spent most of my days there. The staff believed I was an eighteen-year old college freshman at City, interning for Harry, mostly, because I told this lie to anyone who would listen, and it seemed they were listening when they weren’t. And I told it because I wanted to learn from them every aspect of the business.
When I arrived, Blade was copy boy. I didn’t want Blade’s job. I felt it was beneath me and complained about it while I was helping Phil to clean the toilets. I wanted to be a pasteup artist, one of the people who put the newspaper together, proudly watching those cardboard sheets piled carefully in a big box and sent off with an agent to a printing plant in New Jersey—connected to the Mafia; most East Coast printers were; the distributors, too—then waiting, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes for half a day, for a stack of papers to come back, all fresh and smelly to wet our fingers on the ink, turning the pages and smiling.
Instead I was called into Benny’s office one day and he told me to run uptown to retrieve copy because Blade hadn’t shown up. That was the day I became Copy Boy, or had that work tacked on to my runner and janitorial duties. Blade was canned. Poor Blade. Nobody knew what happened to Blade. He just never showed up. But, without that moment, there never would have been Claudia. And without Claudia, I would never have followed my path, probably...
Being copy boy was an addition to my duties, not a replacement. A shifting, thankfully. The summer progressed, others were hired, the paper continued to grow. For a few months, while I learned new skills, and after I stopped sweeping floors and being the runner for coffee and donuts, Benny, Harry or Charles would send me hustling, scurrying, running around the city in all kinds of weather to pick up writer’s stories, their views, wherever they were in their turrets, their shacks, their apartments or houses around the city. I would walk, run, hop on busses, take subways, scoot on ferries. Swaddle myself on chilly days, huff and puff on the hot ones. Enduring spouses and pets and saying yes to invitations. Being a fine boy when I shouldn’t. Because the invitations were few and inviting. But once you start hearing them, if you are a fine boy, they begin to—and this wasn’t a word at the time—network.
Then you end up at a Warhol party and it smacks you in the kisser. You’ve spent a lot of time splashing in puddles. You stop splashing for a moment, you stand facing your image, lulled by all the ripples and impressions, you see your reflection. What’s happening to you? You’ve made a turn, an advancement, you’ve changed from that to this, by stretches you gained new qualities, abilities. No longer the hobbit or hooligan. Do you want to be this person? Because, if you step in this new direction you will move beyond integrating that new being into the old you, you will become that different person and not the old you, taking on…responsibility. Oh, no…maturing! Do you have a choice any longer? Time to drop away the cask of the old you with all the remnants, jettison each piece of the ancient uniform, the shell you carried with you. Reenter the world naked, new, dumb. Assuming you weren’t dumb before.
Oh. And you’ve met the love of your life, sonny boy. How about that?
This rainbow is colorful and that one is dull. Time of day, change in the weather or perspective. The pot of gold at the end isn’t always what you’d expect. Trains don’t always have a terminal point and clouds don’t always have a silver lining. Maximally consequential concerns can become little more than seat cushions upon the Great Chair of one’s life, suffering the vitals of wind and rain and wearing thin over the years. Today I live deep in the wild and wooly West, far from my native homes, homies. But once I was a Copy Boy. There I began a journey. Writer, rebel, raconteur and whatever the fuck I am today. Reminiscent of an old Sam Fuller movie, I suppose. Up hills and down hills. Especially hilly in-house years in old San Francisco before Prop 13 when the great insanity started.
But there was the day of the Claudia Dreifus Pygmalion reversal. I don’t know if she assumed I was being cute, or if that was important. But it sticks in my memory. Her response to my standing there, frozen stiff in front of her, in front of her statuesque present, was the epitome of charm and patience, smiling softly, bowing her head, turning away on one foot. The Olympia which I renamed Claudia for my own purposes. Ideal and portable typewriter. Thankfully, unlike most of the other writers I’ve met over the years, Claudia was a decent human being. Perfect, no. Who is? I never managed to move in her circles and know her too closely. Even today. I headed into the fast down lane and she, decent, rode in a steady straight line to a point in the middle lane. A trick I wouldn’t learn for a long while. Because I would begin to hang out with writers. And other artists, most of whom are necessarily insane, in their outward behaviors and in some instances all the way. But there has been and always will be that touchstone Claudia moment and there were to be several more, writers and others I’d meet who possessed integrity and who made an impression.
Reminds you of that reflection in the puddle when you had a chance to stop splashing. Catch your wind, maybe you’ve fallen down, accidentally seen your reflection and say, Oh, gosh, is that what I look like, or better, you remember, Claudia, where have I transgressed? Yes, a few Copy Boys run the way of Blade, into a ditch. A few boogie on to Woodward and Bernstein status. Or Faulkner or Flaubert. You never know. That’s life. That’s what people say…
Tony and Chico did a lot of teaching. They hired another copy boy and I moved into the paste-up spot and started to do more writing.
When he was younger, Chico had an aversion to insecure people. I was raised through rigid regimentation to be insecure. Insecurity rose in me like sap in the spring, and I had to fight it off. For a while I sat on top of a ladder in the WOO reception area. It drove the secretaries crazy at times. Worse when I climbed down from that ladder and gave them “massages.” Hey. They asked. I never forced. Chico would see me there, shake his head and walk by.
Benny and Charles sent me to Chico to learn paste-up. Not exactly his favorite moment. I was like a fly on him, hunched over the light table. He taught me the rudiments of the darkroom. I knew about art, but Chico taught me how to scrounge for it, be instinctual, rummaging through old books and magazines for “found” pieces. I knew what collage was, but he taught me how to create it. I was in art school, but while I learned the “rules,” everyone at WOO taught me how to break them. The best and worst kind of education simultaneously.
Paste up, the writing, our advertising, the basic cleaning of the bathroom in those earlier years was done with the least amount of discipline, what I needed the most and was trying to run away from constantly. The examples set for me on paste-up nights kept me convinced for more than a decade that I could survive without ever having to answer to The Man, without ever having to keep a journal or a notebook or wake up on time. Without ever having to go back home. Before working that night we all smoked grass or dropped acid, and we created this beautiful rag read by 2 million people around the country. The optimal mind blow for me.
We’d start early, five or six in the evening, and not finish until four or five the next morning, when the printer’s agent would fall through the doorway to pick up the finished pages. For years, a trip in itself, because the printer’s agent had been this stock-broker-type Irishman, nose-drunk, friend to all, but he showed up with dope for Benny or Charles from God-knows-where, probably a Mob connection. I stayed back waiting for breakfast with Benny and whomever he was meeting with at Ratner’s, or a fancier locale, and with Some Impressive People. Or catching the subway with him uptown on my way to school. When I went to school. By then Robin had gone.
When “The Prince” joined the staff he and Chico worked paste-up side by side and mumbled to each other, giggling all night long. It was fascinating to watch, and I did, with envy over the male bonding because they were both my ideal of cool. The Prince stayed with me for a while on 7th Street because he was in the middle of a divorce. He had a string of women and drugs flowing into the apartment, and that was how I managed to gather a closeness with Chico, for the first short time. How I started to get high and have random sex regularly. When the three of us were together, at his place on 11th Street or at mine, he would tell us stories about his years with the motorcycle gang or other anecdotes about his days back in Buffalo. He showed us physical shtick, fighting tricks. I was amazed, big and strong looking as he was, The Prince was so untalented in this arena. Chico practically gave us combat training in his living room.
I started drinking to mimic John and my brother when I was nine. Smoking, too. Like my father. Menthols and Dewar’s. In milk. The Dewar’s. A growing boy needs it. The milk. Not a lot. The Dewar’s. You couldn’t sneak too much in that house. People noticed. I stopped after I left home, since none was available. After all, I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was mimicking my brother’s behavior. But then I accidentally fell in with the “right crowd” at the right time. I wanted to fill in the big hole after Robin left that second time. And people kept coming up to me saying, “Try this,” and I did.
My father left home when he was nine, went to work at odd jobs until he joined the Army. Menthols and Dewar’s. That’s why he was gracious, if that’s the right word, about my leaving when I did. My mother threw half a fit. “He’ll be back with his hand out in a week,” my father said.
The time with Dan Zimmer was mostly about hobnobbing with wild members of the Mellon family, then the Gould’s, not my strain, goodness knows. Philip, Benny’s son, started flirting with another rich girl, someone from Shaker Heights, neither a Mellon nor a Gould, and all of us were involved with heroin, which happened to be trendy at the time, lucky me. There were rich people all over the place. We were also trendy. So I ran into them everywhere.
I hated needles so I didn’t use them. Dr. Schwiener, the “Jew doc” as my father called him, but who my mother insisted on, chased me around the room once with a twelve-inch syringe when I was six, then nailed me with another right in my ass while his seven-year-old daughter was standing in the doorway, watching. He was laughing out loud both times. One or the other ruined me on needles for about forty years.
I did occasional work for Dan Zimmer, who tried, if you can call it that, to network all the underground papers, as if we were starting the Associated Press or something. It was an effort encumbered most of the time by his stiffening, if you can call it that, habit of heroin use. Have I mentioned heroin? One evening, after a morbid amount of typing and phone calls, on my part, he invited me to an informal gathering.
“You’re a Gould, they’re Goulds, you should be friendly.”
“We’re not from the same stock, Dan, I guarantee it.”
“What difference? You’ll like them. You’ve hobnobbed with the rich before.”
Was it Francis Scott Key who said the rich are not like us? I guess not. The rich don’t work like the rest of us, don’t sleep or eat or vacation or gamble or have sex like the rest of us. And doing drugs would not be an exception. It isn’t. Two basic elements make using drugs problematic among the 99 percent: the acquisition of them—including the cost—but in most instances the terror involved, the paranoia about being caught, the fear of jail. The rich have no problems with either concern because their drugs are acquired for them by a safe intermediary and, in those rare instances when they may be arrested it’s like a ride at an amusement park, the trip to the police station and the process of being booked. Having to be finger-printed and talking on the phone to their lawyer. Oh, mercy, what a waste of a dime. I don’t know why they use drugs. High society’s unlimited capacity for indifference would seem to trim back the necessity for escape. Yet escape they do. Taking drugs with rich people is almost like having sex with a rubber doll. I guess people are into that. Apparently not all the rich, but, who knows…
Anyway, there I sat, wobbly, watching the trembling leaves of the Jay Gould family tree shooting up, five males, a couple of females and myself in the room with good ol’ Dan, while I took tiny toots of that nice off-white powder up my mixed-race schnoz, as I had been, off and off in the Music and Art cafeteria when I bothered to go there, where they had an ample supply, M&A located within one of New York City’s biggest heroin marketplaces. This was a polite Upper East Side crowd, not your nodding off downtown or ghetto scuz, and before long some of them were having sex with each other. I started to worry. I mean sex? Okay, but you make your own personal choices and you do it in private.
Walking the streets with a heroin buzz, even a moderate one, is not a distinctively comfortable option. In the event you don’t know. Clearly, and sadly, this was to be the case that evening, and in the dippy dark. The fact of it being a nice neighborhood—Sutton Place is rather nice—had little ameliorative effect. Once high on heroin little has additional ameliorative effect. “Don’t leave,” I heard a furtive whisper, but I didn’t care to respond, and I had no idea what creature the voice emanated from. No offense. Not my thing. But I don’t think it was Dan. Why would he miss me?
Don’t judge. Observe and avoid. If and when and to whatever extent you can. The 59th Street Bridge shone pretty that night and the park bench inviting. You could hardly smell the stink. Or know whence it came from. Up, down. East, west, north, south. Outside. Inside. At least I couldn’t. I sat for a while until I was certain not to be drooling any longer then walked downtown. Arrived at the Zum Zum on Lexington and 45th street.
And that would someday be a nice place to catch some...something. And meet several someones.
When we were bouncing ideas off each other at WOO, especially on covers, which we did a lot in 1967-69, we were remarkably simpatico at times. We were the first weekly to hit the stands with a cover on the USS Pueblo being captured by North Korea—not Time, not Newsweek—and it was my cover, but Chico hand-lettered one of the headlines for me in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t find the right one by scrounging for tchotchkes. That was the night he discovered I was sixteen. It didn’t sit comfortably with him, but it had been a long night, and it was normal not to see each other for days after. That was the period when Zimmer’s heroin crew became a substantial influence over us. Chico didn’t stop working with me, but it further strained on our relationship, one more reason for him to keep his distance, to question why he should be dealing with me outside the office. A “jail-bait” concern, added to his other sensitivities about me.
Tony was different. He and Bonnie had known about my age almost from the beginning and had adopted me as their kid brother. They contained the strangest verisimilitude to my parents, the way they sat and laughed. Tony did exactly what my father did, but he was the “right” to my father’s “wrong,” the “good” to my father’s “bad.”
As Harry and Charles spent more time on outside work, Tony took on more responsibilities in house. Finally, Charles found himself marrying a rich woman who stole him off to Taos, and that would be the last we ever saw of him. Tony took over.
I at dinner Tony and Bonnie’s apartment on 11th Street most nights. I’d helped him build his studio, helped him rebuild their apartment into a model that stood out in that ratty neighborhood. And I babysat when they wanted out.
Tony the builder and woodworker, like my father, on the side. But he was better than my father. Instead of criticizing me for what I couldn’t do, on the spot, calling me incompetent at the first misstep and yelling at me to disappear, he demanded better work of me. It was boy scout quality, building the manliness, getting the work done, team spirit. I was glad to do it, and in retrospect those were my best times, when I was most disciplined in the best sense, when I delivered my best work on the job, both in graphics and in writing, which I was ever a pipsqueak at. I wouldn’t develop any decent writing talent until much, much later. He was the same with all the staff, his gift. While we were giddily stoned, he could merrily crack the whip, everyone laughing in front of their light tables. “Avast! To work, mateys!”
In more than a vague sense, most of us were boy scouts who had reached a fork in the road and found ourselves in a place where we could do our alternative National Service or post-doctoral studies. Or, in my case, a conscientious merit badge. Tony was a perfect example and played scout master with Chico who could never be the boy scout but tried, regarding his potential “conflicts,” perhaps come to terms with his former gang life and inching away from it to a great extent. They did have a lot in common, those two, and they knew it. They looked alike in their bulky, hulking way.
That was my high point, my boy scout period. Or was it? Did I do my most or least damage then?
Then either a badge of honor or a never-ending ramification that the entire staff ended up on Nixon’s hate list. His hit-list. All of us with an FBI file, a Secret Service file, a CIA file, a Lord-knows-what file that lives on to this day. Fame. What a burden.
All right, I know what you’re saying. What am I doing spending all this time bragging about these people? Some of them are famous and maybe I’m name dropping. That’s not what it’s about.
Why should you care about it? Because I’m famous now and people want to know about famous people? No. Because life doesn’t suck. It’s weird. But it doesn’t suck. And one person’s life can teach you a lot about another. And again, why bother going through all of this? Now, when the trainwreck of this story, this bit of it, is just getting going?
And am I lying about any of this? No. I used to lie. Lying was like a Swiss Army Knife for me, but I don’t do it any longer. I don’t lie any more than your most honest person. The way normal people do. You occasionally lie to avoid violence. You buy misery with it, ultimately. Or the other way around, you buy violence to avoid misery. It’s a guessing game and a gamble or sometimes it’s a choice you make. You learn to make the choices. Or, if you’re exceptionally flawless, like truly honest people, it’s a gift. I didn’t lie by nature. If I were dishonest by nature, I’d surely be lying now. I was taught to lie. I was compelled to lie. Essentially, I was forced to lie. Not by the devil. More by circumstance. But more by the fact, at the time, that it seemed necessary, and unimportant. What difference did it make if I told this lie or that one, now or then, to this person or that person? In the end, no one would care. The lying was never excessive, mind you, and it was never fun. It was a burden for me, complicated by guilt, by the anxieties of being found out. Whenever I found it possible I told the truth. And I believed that was enough.
I searched forever. For a way to be completely honest. Just like I searched for decent parents. I’ve never stopped. That’s what it’s about. Not name dropping.
But the worst of it is that lying became a habit for me. I am a habitual person, with an addictive personality, you might say. I can control myself, but it takes an effort. I cannot allow myself to tell a lie here and there. If I do… It would be like eating an ice cream here and there or drinking a rum Collins here and there. I cannot handle it.
With exception for those dynamics determined by nature, human wrongs sit at the heart of what goes amiss, in every case. Some are your responsibility. Some, others. But everything that malfunctions has a starting point. Anyone, anyone with any sense, should be able to track it back to that point. Any malfunction, to any wrong at its starting point. You step into the flow of rivers that began with headwaters from ancient glaciers… And where do glaciers begin?
Where do they end and how?
I mean, do glaciers give a flying fuck who they hurt? They do what they do. For the longest time they don’t hurt anyone that anyone can tell. Then, BOOM, they kill all sorts of people. Don’t they? In the meantime, though, they run the straight and narrow, best they can. Straight and narrow. Best they can.
Like everything else. Everything. Unless they have some intention or natural inclination to do otherwise. Isn’t that funny? Where have we heard that before?
So. Tony was the managing editor, was about to become the publisher with Charles leaving and for some odd reason decided to make me managing editor. Why? That wonderful Pueblo cover.
Benny hated two female folk singers, both of whom he knew intimately, Judy Collins and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. He overlooked explaining the reasons in detail. It must have had to do with drugs, sex, money or a combination of the three. People are entertained, today, with little stories about the Bohemian lifestyle. They know very little of it.
Emigrating from Israel after the ’48 war and after recuperating from his war wounds, Benny had worked for the AP. Then he settled in to a storefront and apartment on top of The Gaslight in the Village where he made jewelry and ran a shop for many years. He partnered with a friend who built a small coffee import business a few blocks away and then opened a coffee shop with a roasting oven in the back. He lived there with his wife, a fashion model, his daughter, his sons, and they were babysat for by the performers downstairs, like young Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Mary Travers, and others. The trouble must have had something to do with that back then. I guess. I’ll never know.
When Benny found out I played guitar, sang, wrote music, had a fledgling band back at M&A, and that I might be interested in pursuing a career in music on the side, he set me up with an audition at Epic Records. He was spurred entirely on by the fact that Judy Collins had a protégé, coincidentally–have I mentioned coincidence?—a classmate of mine at Music and Art, Janis Fink, whom Collins had stage-named Janis Ian. At the time he had a contact, Clive Davis, an up and coming A&R man at Epic Records. Needless to say, I didn’t impress this balding, faux hippie, but, for friendship’s sake, he gave my crew a shot and then gave me a solo audition. Both duds. And deservedly so. Benny was not deterred. He arranged for me to perform at various benefit concerts around the East Village. I ended up onstage with The Lovin’ Spoonful, John Hammond Jr., The Youngbloods, The Fugs, Peggy Florence and others. Janis herself once or twice. By the way, ice between us.
But when Dan Zimmer became cozy with Steve Paul, who owned a club uptown called “The Scene,” Benny notched me a gig as “house musician.” Another great turning of Vico’s Wheel. I was sixteen, turning seventeen, if you know what I mean, but, like many others, Steve Paul didn’t know it, and his arrangement had me performing from the time the door opened until the first act came on stage, a period of 30-60 minutes. For that my pay was all I could drink.
Um, speaking of lying, you do know that you can lie to yourself as well, right? And do any of you out there recall the name “Robin”?
Before that period, I rarely drank. The toying around I had done in mimic of my father and brother I had left behind in favor of greener pastures. But, starting then, I became a heavy drinker, for brief periods. Zimmer, The Prince, and Chico were regulars at “The Scene.” This at the time The Prince roomed with me on 7th Street because he was going through his divorce. Lots of nasty talk about his soon-to-be ex. Naturally, he travelled uptown with me, in style, by cab. I made more money in those days than I knew how to spend, and was never offended by spending it on others, like The Prince, who was experiencing hard times because of that divorce.
The Prince taught me how to drink in a proper, Lithuanian manner, after a few nights of my vomiting it up. We would defer to a Greek diner across the street from the club, for a meal first, applying a food base, often with Chico, with Zimmer or others, then taking a break for food between, and applying a layer of food after. I would end up facing the asphalt up north of Times Square in the middle of the night in any event, heaving, not having to pay a bill, not having any limits, and having The Prince there to hoist me into a cab and drag me up three flights of stairs in the middle of the night.
But I was sober enough in my “house” hour and, with tradition, the house musician was invited to sit in on the first song with the opening act. I was compensated then by playing a shabby rhythm guitar innocuously in the background with Stevie Winwood and Traffic, Edgar and Johnny Winters, and with Jimi Hendrix for a minute or two and a few others. Oh, yeah, I asked him. He didn’t remember Robin’s name or anything else about her.
The drinking, the heroin and rough living played out with my falling viciously ill by early that summer. The Prince had disappeared to white dustland somewhere. Tony or Bonnie had to stop in to keep me clean and eating, to supply me with groceries. There was talk of my moving back home, which I did end up doing for a brief period a few months later, having run out of money. That’s right, girls and boys, about a year after Robin had disappeared without a word following the Easter debacle, I became too sick from drugs and drink and not eating enough to pay for my rent-controlled apartment. Me, who took care of her. But I didn’t want to lose it that roach haven.
Ah, but having to find an illegal sublet for himself, Raymond, yes that Raymond, stepped in at Benny’s suggestion. Out of the mists of time, handily at a moment’s notice.
A few weeks into that sublet, I stopped by to pick up a few books and pieces of clothing I’d left behind. When the door opened, at the hand of a handsome young stranger, I saw Raymond stretched out on Lisa’s old couch in a pair of black panties pulled down across his thighs, half zonked, staring at her beautiful, Vesuvian murals, being catered to by another young, blonde, naked muscle boy. A month later, the place was robbed and cleaned out. Raymond, presumably with muscle boys in tow, evacuated and my lease etherized.
Those murals, those beautiful paintings which truly forewarned of death as much as those they had been inspired by, were immediately painted over.
Elton John. Grand Funk Railroad. Bowie. Led Zeppelin. All Things Must Pass. And they did. I went to see Led Zeppelin at a Madison Square Garden concert. By myself. Wore those same clothes I’d worn years before when Phil and I had wandered behind Raymond in search of some mystery. Did it simply to find out if I had overcome the bloat from all the drinking and could fit back into them, look decent again. Just barely managed. That was the measure I used. Time to come back into society. Back to school. Working at the Post Office.
If there had been some deep moral lesson to be discovered from the trails of Raymond, from all that passed during those days, I have never gleaned it.
Not until now, almost fifty years later.
Perhaps, somehow, I have absorbed it through osmosis.
Wear these thoughts like a leather friendship band, mon lecteur, especially if you have not lived so long, nor lived such a life. Should they ever happen to become wet allow them to tighten around you like the arms of two loving parents. But I know this: the world has never become a better place or worse. It is what it is.
And people are who they are. They can’t become anyone else, no matter how hard they try. No matter where they go. But... It’s never too late to grow up. Nor too late to realize the work is never done.
James Baldwin, of all folks, had this problem with writers being too pedantic about their moral lessons. Too much polemic, not enough metaphor he hinted. I get it. And, you might recall, Seneca reminds us that sometimes you just have to ram crap down people’s throats?
People are who they are. People do what they do. Don’t judge them. Don’t judge yourself. Have compassion. And as much as you can spare. We aren’t here long enough for anything else. We don’t have enough time to play games.
We no longer even have enough time to learn the rules. Rules? Who needs stinkin’ rules?
I’ll tell you who. A guy named Frank Terpil. So, why did I stop here to tell you all this?
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