Forest, decor by Andy Warhol

Merce Cunningham Dance

Saw these at Leo Castelli’s in 1966 along with the cow wallpaper. Here is somebody selling one of the pillows that Leo could not sell even for $50, for $47,914.90

DM to a friend:

“I lived around the corner from the Electric Circus on 6th St. My neighbor was a dancer there. Remember seeing through the fish eye peephole firemen carrying her out on a sheepskin one time.

Crazy times we were operating without a map. Seriously thought staying high ALL the time was a thing. I had an offer to join that crowd which I turned down immediately knowing my attraction to meth and that scene would be the end of me.”

May the Torching Carrying Mob following me, each quoting one of my snide remarks, my flippant knocks, disparaging opinions, and careless bitterness…. light my way forward and highlight how far I have come.

Uncouple the apparent effort to make me relive the moment and convert shame into forgiveness. And may at least one in the mob be wearing jodhpurs.

Don’t know why, the veil is thin, the season is starting to turn, then a last grip of wind and cold comes and snatches it back. The strange mix of unreality and the starkest reality brought close in, all sense of ‘far away’ gone. In Faulkner’s words a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. In Heaven the President’s prophetess says cows drive tractors and there is city of Jello.

Into this from the next world, steps my old friend shining bright, she who gave me a home when I broke free from the hospital where I met her. I had set two fires thinking that I could get away during an evacuation. Sounds extreme, not to say criminal but a childhood friend had brought me news that they were planning to transfer me to Pilgrim State where Ginsberg’s mother died and Carl Solomon was.

The threat of years trapped in smelly Pilgrim State was enough to make this arson plan proportionate. It didn’t work. I set it in motion with a fuse made from a cigarette stuck in a book of matches and then went and lay down. Minutes passed. My door was open. Right outside was the telephone and one of the patients was on it. She could see me and see me see a column of smoke coming along the ceiling. So the only “natural” thing to do to give the appearance of innocence was to run and put my handiwork out.

Again they were going to have trouble proving it was me so nothing was said. I think they may have come to to conclusion to get rid of me quick at that time. In any case two days later they came and asked if I wanted to leave. I couldn’t believe my ears. Of course I said yes and in my memory it seemed like the work of minutes to call Carla and call my friend who had brought the news and stick all my things in a large Kotex box and walk out the door.

She took me in. I think I feel more gratitude in this moment; at the time I may have been a little afraid of this shocking good luck and thought it best to act natural. This is her apartment.

Had the odd experience of finding it online. The rent is now $1925/mo. In 1970 we paid $64. An old man who had lived there forever had died and rent control produced the rent, low even for back then. That door is a tiny toilet and there is a kitchen behind the camera. The kitchen had a shower in it so quite small like a galley. We were both on welfare and she may have been getting a stipend to go to the fashion institute. Eighty eight dollars every two weeks and frequent trips to the welfare office every time they tried to throw me off. That’s where references to arson in a locked mental facility came in handy.

This picture bears an uncanny resemblance to her.

photo: Savannah Angela

I think a whole other layer of the past came off, the hijink and betrayal, her running off for days, her maddening habit of taking hours to get ready to go anywhere, sometimes so long that whatever it was was over and she would have to start again for the next appointment.

I’m not feeling that now, have no heart for the story of her hurling a bowling ball after me when I finally left and met the fate she saved me from, that is having no place of my own in wintery Manhattan with restaurants pumping out the smell of foods from all over the world I couldn’t buy. By the end of the month my eyes would swivel toward the balloon tires on police cars, thinking they had spied chocolate covered donuts. No, I can only sense her presence, her beauty. Her wild Irish ways and raw heart and nerves right on the surface. People sometimes asked if we were brother and sister.

Carla who I had to walk to the Fashion Institute on 27th street in Chelsea from 6th Street in the East Village with Carla chopping away quite fast because as usual she had taken and hour and a half to get ready. I joked that I was her pedestrian chauffeur.

She auditioned for Yoko Ono’s film in which a fly crawls around on a woman’s body. I was given firm instruction not to try to meet John and Yoko. We went over to their loft on the Bowery where they had hung an ordinary white bath towel to make a kind of vestibule. I was a little surprised at how beat the place was. Not the Dakota. They were only a few feet away and mostly I remember staring at the terry cloth and listening to John’s voice and having that stupid moment where you go ‘he sounds just like John Lennon’ as if *really* hearing him should be a departure. She didn’t get the part.

Random scene:

6th Street NYC 1971

Once I was asked to help some friends downstairs.

Their water bed had sprung a leak. We got it rigged to syphon out the window. I thought it odd that it didn’t make much of a splashing sound but didn’t think anything of it. About half an hour later there was a knock on the door and there stood the neighbor from the basement apartment

“My apartment is flooded! Why did you do this!?”

“Do What? Do What?”

“My Cat is Dead and you are shooting water at it!”

Seems somehow in his grief over his cat he thinks this

is a plan of ours, but then he has just come home,

found his apartment flooded,

traced the problem out back,

where he was confronted with his newly dead cat with a stream of

water hitting it from upstairs and then deflecting off it down the little stairs to his place instead of out in the yard according to plan.

It took a few tries to convince him that we Never check for dead cats when syphoning leaky waterbeds. That’s just the way we are.

-:-

We were friends with people in the building. Ron and Shirley and their son John and his girl friend Helen. They were from California, Helen was gorgeous, Latina with long straight black hair. Carla and Helen used to harass Joe Dallesandro by giving accidental naked shows. He lived right across the street next to Phoenix House. Late one night they lured him as far as his front stoop where a load whispered conversation took place including “Just going out for cigarettes”. I believe that errand got postponed.

Joe:

“Like with the Andy Warhol situation, I went to him because I was interested in Campbell’s soup, I just wanted to get a bowl of soup [laughs].”

“Yeah, people would come up to me and know about me through something else. So I showed up at his place and they kept telling me he was an artist but I didn’t know how art had anything to do with soup. I was a young kid and over time Paul Morrissey became my mentor. To me, these movies they were making were just silliness, they weren’t really movies, but yet they had a big following and people wanted to see me, they wanted to see how I reacted to certain situations. Paul taught me the importance of the films. So yeah, the Andy Warhol thing was an accident.”

Across the hall was Carol, a dancer at the Electric Circus, the club Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground were connected to and where the Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows were held.

She had an eighteen month old and her sometime boyfriend David had the unit next to hers. One day not long after I’d arrived David was knocking loudly and calling her name. This went on for some time until annoyance became panic. Don’t know how he got in but when he did he found her dead. Firemen came and carried her out on a sheepskin. I saw all this through the distorted lens of the peephole. That scene, what with the sheepskin and her frail body looking for all the world like a deposition from the cross. Ron and Shirley adopted the baby.

John and Helen had started making eight millimeter reels. This was the early days of porn going mainstream, Deep Throat had just come out and the scene had a thin gloss of subversive chic. They talked Carla into giving it a try. Poor kid was not cut out for it but the $150 sounded awfully good to us church mice, it would be $1200 today for a few hours work. I didn’t go along. And Carla’s plan to get through it on whiskey and Valium was a disaster. I had no experience with any of this. I had been married at nineteen I was twenty three and in love and had a tiger by the tail. Thirteen long months later the wheels came off.

What lead to the final break was this: Once as I was leaving I caught a flash, a highlight. I wondered what a highlight was doing there in the kitchen and turned to see Carla, off the ground, airborne with a carving knife, the kind with prongs on the end. I caught her wrist in time to stop the prong right in front of my right eye. Maybe because I was glad I didn’t have a knife in my back or eye, I was feeling generous and put the relief into diffusing the situation. I was trying to get out the door to see Hog Farm friends for the first time back from Nepal. She got anxious and didn’t want to go, I didn’t have time for a lot of back and forth and sloughed off the matter and turned. I didn’t expect that it would trigger anything much less the ability to fly through the air in that tiny kitchen.

Even that didn’t break the spell although by then I was hoping something would. Maybe she got scared of herself and her homicidal tendencies, in any case on what pretext I don’t know she enlisted younger guys to come throw me out. This felt like a charade to me, there had been no fight, I was playing the Oscar Wilde version of forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much and apparently he was right. But something about them being younger and one of them John a friend all prepped for a big scene seemed to flip the switch and with a little laugh, I got up and walked out the door. I’d cleared the first flight of stairs when the bowling ball flew.

Two months later I bumped into her at the laundromat. I had stopped because the apartment above the laundromat was on fire, smoke pouring out, ladders, hoses, the whole scene and Carla suddenly appearing her eyes amazingly vivid, green. [I didn’t know she had gotten tinted contacts]

She was friendly which surprised me and made me leery. We talked for a bit, a crowd gathering to watch the fire. Then she got agitated checked right and left and made a beeline for the laundromat door, stepping through the maze of hoses, to check her clothes in the dryer. For some reason it was a signal to me that it was going to be OK that we broke up, that I wasn’t going to miss her the way I did when we were together and she ran off for days.

That was the last time I saw her for years, bent over, her head in the dryer plucking at her clothes.

Hearing this song earlier is what got me thinking about her and noticing that I was on to another stage, losing the charge on the riotous stuff that went on and having tender feelings for her again. Tears of Rage

She hung out with these guys in Woodstock and was a chippie that ended up with a habit and, as in the song, was carried to the bus station, in her version, laid out on her steamer trunk and the boys around her like pall bearers. She had knocked her father over driving off in the car and got put in the hospital for that. When I checked in with her in 2003 she was still telling the story in the exact same words....”so unfair, I didn’t run him over,I just clipped him with the door” This accounted for the “What dear daughter ...would treat her father so” line and others.

-:-

In the last two weeks I have had prompts to call her in New York. I wondered if she was sick or that was her getting in touch because she left already. I wanted to say some kind words because the last time I saw her I left in a huff. We were about to go out the door and she said “I just need to put in my contacts.” She went in the bathroom got lost and spent forty five minutes doing, what? Classic move. I headed straight to the airport. So today I called her sister in Connecticut and I could tell right away whatever it was was over. She had died in September, but it was September of 2012.

I think I must have had one foot already in fight or flight due to big things shifting around in my life at the moment because it did not land like a blow to get the news. It’s a special category of grief when it’s someone you were intimate with, that bond that some describe as a silver thread.

How different than hearing in 1980 from a friend that Laura had died the previous year: “You must be mistaken. No one told me. I called back East at least three or four times this year…” Just flat denial and then waiting all night with not a thought in my head, motionless on the couch all night until six when I could call her Mother in Connecticut. Of course it was true.

Now forty years later there was the matter of a little bird telling me to call to check in on Carla, to call her. I thought I was going to hear that she was sick. Somehow, as with my birth Mother, who my half sister told me was funny til the end, it was the perfect balm to hear from Carla’s sister that she was cheerful about it. All debt falling away.