Seven Autobiographical Accounts of Arriving in New York

Andy Warhol Jonas Mekas Joan Didion Bob Dylan John Cale Seven Autobiographical Accounts of Arriving in New York

Andy Warhol Jonas Mekas Joan Didion Bob Dylan John Cale Patti Smith Chantal Akerman In Order of Arrival to New York: In Order of Arrival to New York:

Andy Warhol 1949 p.6 Jonas Mekas 1949 p.22 John Cale 1961 p.39 Joan Didion 1956 p.39 Chantal Akerman 1972 p.116 Bob Dylan 1961 p.83 Patti Smith 1967 p.99

Text from: Text from: Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” (From A to B and Back Again) Dylan’s Bob Dylan Chronicles II Cale’s What’s Welsh for Zen: Smith’s Just Kids The Autobiography of John Cale Film Stills from: Film Stills from: Mekas’s Letter to Penny Arcade (2001), A Walk Mekas’s George’s Dumpling Party June 29, (1990), I Leave Chelsea Hotel (1967), Patti 1971,Velvet Underground’s First Appearance Smith at Anthology Film Archives (1964) Febr. 19, 1998 Akerman’s La Chambre, , News from Home Andy Warhol Jonas Mekas

I had a job one summer in a department store look- ing through Vogues and Harper’s Bazaars and Euro- pean fashion magazines for a wonderful man named Mr. Vollmer. I got something like fifty cents an hour and my job was to look for “ideas.” I don’t remem- [Pours himself a drink] ber ever finding one or getting one. Mr. Vollmer was an idol to me because he came from New York and Dear Penny Arcade, I drink to you. Now when we that seemed so exciting. I wasn’t really thinking about talked, now that was already months ago. Oh how ever going there myself, though. time goes. You asked me why I like New York.

1949 Andy Warhol Jonas Mekas 1949 But when I was eighteen a friend stuffed me in- [Laughs] to a Kroger’s shopping bag and took me to New York. I still wanted to be close with people. I kept This evening somehow I remembered that question living with roommates thinking we could become and I felt like I did not exactly do justice to your ques- good friends and share problems, but I’d always find tion. You see, new york is my home. My new home. out that they were just interested in another person Not America. No not America. When I came in late sharing the rent. At one point I lived with seventeen 49 I mean everything was new and strange. But I lived different people in a basement apartment on 103rd here now for 50 years. Every street, I walk the streets Street and Avenue, and not one person and I see there is a house here and its no longer there. out of the seventeen ever shared a real problem with me. They were all creative kids, too-it was more or I grew up with the downtown streets. I was so lone- less an Art Commune so I know they must have had ly when I came. And those streets those houses those lots of problems, but I never heard about any of them. people that walked around me and I did not know There were fights in the kitchen a lot over who had who were they were. They became part of me. They bought which slice of salami, but that was about it. were like memories. I created a whole set of new I worked very long hours in those days, so I guess I memories. When I walk now I see all the places I wouldn’t have had time to listen to any of their prob- recognize I remember I was there. I worked there. lems even if they had told me any, but I still felt left Allen lived there. I mean every every, where is the out and hurt. house where Robert frank, when I met Robert Frank I’d be making the rounds looking for jobs all day, first, no it is no longer there. But I walked the streets and then be home drawing them at night. That was where roberts house was. I see it there, I see it right my life in the 50s: greeting cards and watercolors and there. I don’t see the new building there, I see Rob- now and then a coffeehouse poetry reading. ert’s house. It’s part of me. Part of my New York. Part The things I remember most about those days, aside of my New York memories. And the summers. The from the long hours I spent working, are the cock- winters the summers. The summers that no people roaches. Every apartment I ever stayed in was load- run away from in New York. NO! I like when New ed with them. I’ll never forget the humiliation of York is hot! Like today it was thundering and it was bringing my portfolio up to Carmel Snow’s office raining and I was sweating and its humid but I LIKE

Andy Warhol 7 8 Jonas Mekas at Harper’s Bazaar and unzipping it only to have a it. I LIKE IT WHEN ITS HOT. I LIKE THE SUM- roach crawl out and down the leg of the table. She MERS OF NEW YORK I LIKE THE WINTERS felt so sorry for me that she gave me a job. OF NEW YORK I like the autumns of New York. So I had an incredible number of roommates. To The spring usually comes almost unnoticed. Even this day almost every night I go out in New York I though its winter. And suddenly its summer, like to- run into somebody I used to room with who invari- day! So I drink to new york. I drink to New York. ably explains to my date, “I used to live with Andy.” My friends. I always turn white-I mean whiter. After the same scene happens a few times, my date can’t figure out [Takes a sip] how I could have lived with so many people, espe- cially since they only know me as the loner I am to- [CUT] day. Now, people who imagine me as the 60s media partygoer who traditionally arrived at parties with a Aw my New York. So, dear Penny, good you are re- minimum six-person “retinue” may wonder how I cording this for those who do not know what New dare to call myself a “loner,” so let me explain how I York, how great New York is. To you. really mean that and why it’s true. At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and look- [Takes a sip of his drink] ing for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers, so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the AH! ITS HOT! I feel great. most like not being alone. The moment I decided I’d rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their Yeah Penny. I would almost credit New York for sav- problems, everybody I’d never even seen before in ing my sanity when I came here from the post war my life started running after me to tell me things I’d Europe. When I was full of doubts about everything just decided I didn’t think it was a good idea to hear this civilization, oh the affairs of this world the coun- about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, tries that were selling countries like thieves sell horses that’s when I got what you might call a “following.” for pennies. This city saved my sanity. I threw myself As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. into it completely. I am wasted. And the city embraced I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic. me. The first years when I came here I did not miss a

Andy Warhol 9 10 Jonas Mekas Because I felt I was picking up the problems of single theatre performance a single film that opened friends, I went to a psychiatrist in a single ballet performance. The music. I was hun- and told him all about myself. I told him my life sto- gry thirsty for art. I was like the sponge so dry. That ry and how I didn’t have any problems of my own is ready to absorb anything. I was the garbage can. I and how I was picking up my friends’ problems, and was the dry empty sponge I took everything and ev- he said he would call me to make another appoint- erything became part of me. ment so we could talk some more, and then he nev- er called me. As I’m thinking about it now, I realize New York. Seasons of the year. The dust of the streets. it was unprofessional of him to say he was going to The people. The buildings. The cars the NOISE! I call and then not call. On the way back from the psy- like the noise of New York. I even like the noise of chiatrist’s I stopped in Macy’s and out of the blue I New York. bought my first television set, an RCA 19-inch black and white. I brought it home to the apartment where The subways. The rattling of the subways when I I was living alone, under the El on East 75th Street, lived in williamsburgh, the elevated trains. I love the and right away I forgot all about the psychiatrist. I bowery. I love everything about New York. Because kept the TV on all the time, especially while people its part of me. Because it saved me. It saved my sanity. were telling me their problems, and the television I Slowly I began building myself. Almost from scratch. found to be just diverting enough so the problems And this city helped me to do that. I’m still build- people told me didn’t really affect me any more. It ing myself. But whatever I am, in addition to all the was like some kind of magic. French poets I am mostly greatful to New York. I My apartment was on top of Shirley’s Pin-Up Bar, drink to New York and to you, Penny Arcade. where Mabel Mercer would come to slum and sing “ You’re So Adorable,” and the TV also put that in a [Drinks] whole new perspective. The building was a five-floor walk-up and originally I’d had the apartment on the Now let’s see what chance music we have in New fifth floor. Then, when the second floor became avail- York. able, I took that, too, so now I had two floors, but not two consecutive ones. After I got my TV, though, I [Turns on radio]

Andy Warhol 11 12 Jonas Mekas stayed more and more in the TV floor. In the years after I’d decided to be a loner, I got THE RADIO OF NEW YORK! The radio. The more and more popular and found myself with more radio. Time Square. 8th avenue. Of the 50s. Ah folks. and more friends. Professionally I was doing well. I I’m wondering I you know what im talking about. had my own studio and a few people working for me, and an arrangement evolved where they actual- [Gets up from his chair and dances in the back of the ly lived at my work studio. In those days, everything room, then off screen. The table is shaking from the was loose, . The people in the studio were dancing. Puts on a sun hat. Sits back down. Retrieves there night and day. Friends of friends. Maria Callas his accordion and plays along to the radio.] was always on the phonograph and there were lots of mirrors and a lot of tinfoil. [CUT] I had by then made my Pop Art statement, so I had a lot of work to do, a lot of canvases to stretch. I Transcription of video by Jonas Mekas, A Letter to Penny worked from ten a.m. to ten p.m., usually, going home Arcade, 2001, in which Mekas records an audio letter to sleep and coming back in the morning, but when to his friend Penny Arcade in his New York apartment. I would get there in the morning the same people I’d left there the night before were still there, still going strong, still with Maria and the mirrors. This is when I started realizing how insane people can be. For example, one girl moved into the eleva- tor and wouldn’t leave for a week until they refused to bring her any more Cokes. I didn’t know what to make of the whole scene. Since I was paying the rent for the studio, I guessed that this somehow was actu- ally my scene, but don’t ask me what it was all about, because I never could figure it out. The location was great—47th Street and Third Av- enue. We’d always see the demonstrators on their way

Andy Warhol 13 14 Jonas Mekas to the UN for all the rallies. The Pope rode by on 47th Street once on his way to St. Patrick’s. Khrush- chev went by once, too. It was a good, wide street. Famous people had started to come by the studio, to peek at the on-going party, I suppose-Kerouac, Ginsberg, Fonda and Hopper, Barnett Newman, Judy Garland, the Rolling Stones. The Velvet Under- ground had started rehearsing in one part of the loft, just before we got a mixed media roadshow togeth- er and started our cross-country in 1963. It seemed like everything was starting then. The counterculture, the subculture, pop, superstars, drugs, lights, discotheques—whatever we think of as “young-and-with-it”—probably started then. There was always a party somewhere: if there wasn’t a par- ty in a cellar, there was one on a roof, if there wasn’t a party in a subway, there was one on a bus; if there wasn’t one one a boat, there was one in the Statue of Liberty. People were always getting dressed up for a party. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” was the name of a song the Velvets used to do at the Dom when the Low- er East Side was just beginning to shake off its im- migrant status and get hip. “What costumes shall the poor girl wear/To all tomorrow’s parties...” I really liked that song. The Velvets played it and Nico sang it. In those days everything was extravagant. You had to be rich to be able to afford pop clothes from bou- tiques like Paraphernalia or from designers like Ti-

Andy Warhol 15 Joan Didion ger Morse. Tiger would go down to Klein’s and Mays and buy a two-dollar dress, tear off the ribbon and flower, bring it up to her shop, and sell it for four hundred dollars. She had a way with accessories, too. She’d paste a ditsy on something from Woolworth’s and charge fifty dollars for it. She had an uncanny talent for being able to tell which people who came into her shop were actually going to buy something. I once saw her look for a second at a nice-looking well-dressed lady and say, “I’m sorry, there’s noth- ing for sale for you here.” She could always tell. She would buy anything that glittered. She was the per- son who invented the electric-light dress that carried its own batteries. In the 60s everybody got interested in everybody else. Drugs helped a little there. Everybody was equal suddenlydebutantes and chauffeurs, waitresses and governors. A friend of mine named Ingrid from New Jersey came up with a new last name, just right for her new, loosely defined showbusiness career. She called herself “Ingrid Superstar.” I’m positive Ingrid invented that word. At least, I invite anyone with “su- perstar” clippings that predate Ingrid’s to show them to me. The more parties we went to, the more they wrote her name in the papers, Ingrid Superstar, and “superstar” was starting its media run. Ingrid called me a few weeks ago. She’s operating a sewing ma- chine now. But her name is still going. It seems in-

Andy Warhol 17 18 Joan Didion credible, doesn’t it? It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder In the 60s everybody got interested in everybody. to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity In the 70s everybody started dropping everybody. that makes the nerves in the back of my neck con- The 60s were Clutter. strict, when New York began for me, but I cannot The 70s are very empty. lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can nev- When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so er cut through the ambiguities and second starts and much about having close relationships with other broken resolves to the exact place on the page where people. I’d been hurt a lot to the degree you can on- the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once ly be hurt if you care a lot. So I guess I did care a lot, was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and in the days before anyone ever heard of “pop art” or it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old “underground movies” or “superstars.” Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which So in the late 50s I started an affair with my tele- had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed vision which has continued to the present, when I less smart already, even in the old Idlewild tempo- play around in my bedroom with as many as four at rary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew a time. But I didn’t get married until 1964 when I and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I got my first tape recorder. My wife. My tape record- had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about er and I have been married for ten years now. When New York, informed me that it would never be quite I say “we,” I mean my tape recorder and me. A lot of the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later people don’t understand that. there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone because a problem just meant a good tape, and when wonders something like that, sooner or later and no a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed a problem any more. An interesting problem was an blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even interesting tape. Everybody knew that and performed twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, for the tape. You couldn’t tell which problems were all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ev- real and which problems were exaggerated for the er happened to anyone before.

Andy Warhol 19 Joan Didion 1956 tape. Better yet, the people telling you the problems Of course it might have been some other city, had couldn’t decide any more if they were really having circumstances been different and the time been dif- the problems or if they were just performing. ferent and had I been different, might have been Paris During the 60s, I think, people forgot what emo- or or even San Francisco, but because I am tions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve talking about myself I am talking here about New ever remembered. I think that once you see emo- York. That first night I opened my window on the tions from a certain angle you can never think of bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I them as real again. That’s what more or less has hap- could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs pened to me. that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and I don’t really know if I was ever capable of love, but then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed re- after the 60s I never thought in terms of “love” again. markable and exotic, for I had come out of the West However, I became what you might call fascinated where there was no summer rain), and for the next by certain people. One person in the 60s fascinated three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room me more than anybody I had ever known. And the air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a fascination I experienced was probably very close to cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a certain kind of love. a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did ... occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air con- ditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did Taxi was from Charleston, South Carolina—a not know how much to tip whoever might come— confused beautiful debutante who’d split with her was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that family and come to New York. She had a poignantly someone was. All I could do during those years was vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would everybody’s private fantasies. Taxi could be anything never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I you wanted her to be—a little girl, a woman, intelli- told him, just six months, and I could see the Brook- gent, dumb, rich, poor-anything. She was a wonderful lyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the , beautiful blank. The mystique to end all mystiques. bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years. She was also a compulsive liar; she just couldn’t tell In retrospect it seems to me that those days before the truth about anything. And what an actress. She I knew the names of all the bridges were happier

Andy Warhol 21 22 Joan Didion could really turn on the tears. She could somehow than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will always make you believe her-that’s how she got what see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell she wanted. you is what it is like to be young in New York, how Taxi invented the mini-skirt. She was trying to six months can become eight years with the decep- prove to her family back in Charleston that she could tive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years live on nothing, so she would go to the Lower East appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental Side and buy the cheapest clothes, which happen dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram to be little girls’ skirts, and her waist was so tiny she Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a could get away with it. Fifty cents a skirt. She was the revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal first person to wear ballet tights as a complete outfit, older, and on a different street. But most particular- with big earrings to dress it up. She was an innova- ly I want to explain to you, and in the process per- tor-out of necessity as well as fun-and the big fash- haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It ion magazines picked up on her look right away. She is often said that New York is a city for only the very was pretty incredible. rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New We were introduced by a mutual friend who had York is also, at least for those of us who came there just made a fortune promoting a new concept in from somewhere else, a city only for the very young. kitchen appliances on television quiz shows. After I remember once, one cold bright December eve- one look at Taxi I could see that she had more prob- ning in New York, suggesting a friend who com- lems than anybody I’d ever met. So beautiful but so plained of having been around too long that he come sick. I was really intrigued. with me to a party where there would be, I assured She was living off the end of her money. She still him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, had a nice Sutton Place apartment, and now and then “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and she would talk a rich friend into giving her a wad. As I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on I said, she could turn on the tears and get anything the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me she wanted. about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had In the beginning I had no idea how many drugs Taxi gone to a party where he had been promised “new took, but as we saw more and more of each other it be- faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and gan to dawn on me how much of a problem she had. he had already spelt with five of the women and owed

Andy Warhol 23 24 Joan Didion Next in importance for her, after taking the drugs, money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, was having the drugs. Hoarding them. She would but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big hop in a limousine and make a run to Philly crying Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I the whole way that she had no amphetamines. And could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and somehow she would always get them because there it would be a long while before I would come to un- was just something about Taxi. Then she would add derstand the particular moral of the story. it to the pound she had stashed away at the bottom It would be a long while because, quite simply, I of her footlocker. was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in One of her rich sponsor-friends even tried to set any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with her up in the fashion business, designing her own the city, the way you love the first person who ever line of clothes. He’d bought a loft on 29th Street out- touches you and you never love anyone quite that right from a schlock designer who had just bought way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second a condominium in Florida and wanted to leave the Street one twilight that first spring, or the second city fast. The sponsor-friend took over the operation spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to of the whole loft with the seven seamstresses still at meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue their machines and brought Taxi in to start design- and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating ing. The mechanics of the business were all set up, all it and knew that I had come out out of the West and she had to do was come up with designs that were reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel basically no more than copies of the outfits that she the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my styled for herself. legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expen- She wound up giving “pokes” to the seamstress- sive perfume and I knew that it would cost something es and playing with the bottles of beads and buttons sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did and trimmings that the previous manager had left not come from there—but when you are twenty-two lining the wall. The business, needless to say, didn’t or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have prosper. Taxi would spend most of the day at lunch a high emotional balance, and be able to pay what- uptown at Reuben’s ordering their Celebrity Sand- ever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still wiches-the Anna Maria Alberghetti, the Arthur God- had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that some- frey, the Morton Downey were her favorites-and she thing extraordinary would happen any minute, any

Andy Warhol 25 26 Joan Didion would keep running into the ladies room and sticking day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a her finger down her throat and throwing each one week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” up. She was obsessed with not getting fat. She’d eat I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by and eat on a spree and then throw up and throw up, an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so and then take four downers and pop off for four days little money that some weeks I had to charge food at at a time. Meanwhile her “friends” would come in to Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact “rearrange” her pocketbook while she was sleeping. which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to When she’d wake up four days later she’d deny that California. I never told my father that I needed mon- she’d been asleep. ey because then he would have sent it, and I would At first I thought that Taxi only hoarded drugs. never know if I could do it by myself. At that time I knew that hoarding is a kind of selfishness, but I making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary thought it was only with the drugs that she was that but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain way. I’d see her beg people for enough for a poke and kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, then go and file it in the bottom of her footlocker say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the riv- in its own little envelope with a date on it. But I fi- er, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus nally realized that Taxi was selfish about absolutely and would look in the bright windows of brown- everything. stones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and One day when she was still in the designing busi- and imagine women lighting candles on the floor ness a friend and I went to visit her. There were scraps above and beautiful children being bathed on the and scraps of velvets and satins all over the floor and floor above that—except on nights like those, I nev- my friend asked if she could have a piece just large er felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money enough to make a cover for a dictionary she owned. I could always get it. I could write a syndicated col- There were thousands of scraps all over the floor, umn for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or practically covering our feet, but Taxi looked at her I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a and said, “The best time is in the morning. Just come $100 call girl, and none of would matter. by in the morning and look through the pails out Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within front and you’ll probably find something.” reach. Just around every corner lay something cu- Another time we were riding in a cab and she was rious and interesting, something I had never before

Andy Warhol 27 28 Joan Didion crying that she didn’t have any money, that she was seen or done or known about. I could go to a par- poor, and she opened her pocketbook for a Kleen- ty and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emo- ex and I happened to catch sight of one of those tional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Insti- clear plastic change purses all stuffed with green. I tute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker didn’t bother to say anything. What was the point? who was then a regular on what the called “the Big But the next day I asked her, “What happened to C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well that clear plastic change purse you had yesterday that connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me was stuffed with money?” She said, “It was stolen last over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or night at a discotheque.” She couldn’t tell the truth the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market about anything. or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or Taxi hoarded brassieres. She kept around fifty bras- someone who had already made and list two fortunes sieres -in graduated shades of beige, through pale pink in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and deep rose to coral and white—in her trunk. They and to other people and there would be all the time all had the price tags on them. She would never re- in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night move a price tag, not even from the clothes she wore. and make mistakes, and none of them would count. One day the same friend that asked her for the scrap You see I was in a curious position in New York: of material was short on cash and Taxi owed her mon- it never occurred to me that I was living a real life ey. So she decided to take a brassiere that still had the there. In my imagination I was always there for just Bendel’s tags on it back to the store and get a refund. another few months, just until Christmas or Easter When Taxi wasn’t looking she stuffed it into her bag or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was and went uptown. She went to the lingerie depart- most comfortable with the company of Southerners. ment and explained that she was returning the bra They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some for a friend-it was obvious that this girl was far from indefinitely extended leave from wherever they be- an A-cup. The saleslady disappeared for ten minutes longed, disciplined to consider the future, temporary and then came back holding the bra and some kind exiles who always knew when the flights left for New of a log book and said, “Madame. This bra was pur- Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, chased in 1956.” Taxi was a hoarder. California. Someone who lives with a plane sched- Taxi had an incredible amount of makeup in her ule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

Andy Warhol 29 30 Joan Didion bag and in her footlocker: fifty pairs of lashes ar- Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Oth- ranged according to size, fifty mascara wands, twen- er people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or ty mascara cakes, every shade of Revlon shadow ever going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ made-iridescent and regular, matte and shiny-twenty places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that Max Factor blush-ons... She’d spend hours with her we lived somewhere else would spend it making and makeup bags Scotch-taping little labels on every- canceling airline reservations, waiting for weather- thing, dusting and shining the bottles and compacts. bound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in Everything had to look perfect. 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of But she didn’t care about anything below the neck. us who were left, with oranges and mementos and She would never take a bath. smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, I would say, “Taxi. Take a bath.” I’d run the water colonials in a far country. and she would go into the bathroom with her bag Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure and stay in there for an hour. I’d yell, “Are you in the that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East tub?” “Yes, I’m in the tub.” Splash splash. But then I’d to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of hear her tip-toeing around the bathroom and I’d peek New York, means to those of us who came out of through the keyhole and she’d be standing in front the West and the South. To an Eastern child, partic- of the mirror, putting on more makeup over what ularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall was already caked on her face. She would never put Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays water on her face-only those degreasers, those little first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at tissue-thin papers you press on that remove the oils Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and without ruining the makeup. She used those. dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, al- A few minutes later I’d peek through the keyhole beit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But again and she’d be recopying her address book-or to those of us who came from places where no one somebody else’s address book, it didn’t matter-or else had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station she’d be sitting with a yellow legal pad making the was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and list of all the men she’d ever been to bed with, divid- Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not plac- ing them into three categories” Slept,” “Fucked,” and es at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fash- “Cuddled.” If she made a mistake on the last line and ion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere

Andy Warhol 31 32 Joan Didion it looked messy, she’d tear it off and start all over. After city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the an hour she’d come out of the bathroom and I’d say, mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, gratuitously, “You didn’t take a bath.” “Yes. Yes I did.” the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of I slept in the same bed with Taxi once. Someone “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the was after her and she didn’t want to sleep with him, mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu. so she crawled into bed in the next room with me. In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to un- She fell asleep and I just couldn’t stop looking at her, derstand those young women for whom New York because I was so fascinated-but-horrified. Her hands was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, kept crawling, they couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t stay girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets still. She scratched herself constantly, digging her nails in their apartments and committed themselves to in and leaving marks. In three hours she woke up and some reasonable furniture. I never bought any fur- said immediately that she hadn’t been asleep.. niture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other Taxi drifted away from us after she started seemg people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties a singer-musician who can only be described as The in an apartment furnished entirely with things tak- Definitive Pop Star—possibly of all time—who was en from storage by a friend whose wife had moved then fast gaining recognition on both sides of the away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties Atlantic as the thInkmg man’s Elvis Presley. I missed (that was when I was leaving everything, when it having her around, but I told myself that it was prob- was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my ably a good thing that he was taking care of her now, winter clothes and the map of Sacramento Coun- because maybe he knew how to do it better than we ty I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me had. who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room Taxi died a few years ago in Hawaii where an im- floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is portant industrialist had taken her for a “rest.” I hadn’t perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severi- seen her for years. ty; until after I was married and my husband moved ... some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to half there than all-there-I always suspected that I was move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a

Andy Warhol 33 34 Joan Didion watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that say that the way things happen in the movies is un- the people I knew in New York all had curious and real, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlem- strong and real, whereas when things really do hap- mer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Har- pen to you, it’s like watching television-you don’t lem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated feel anything. for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew of us was very serious, engagé only about our most that I was watching television. The channels switch, private lives.) but it’s all television. When you’re really really in- All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards volved with something, you’re usually thinking about of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, something else. When something’s happening, you because I had some idea that the gold light would fantasize about other things. When I woke up some- make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight where-I didn’t know it was at the hospital and that the curtains correctly and all that summer the long Bobby Kennedy had been shot the day after I was- I panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the heard fantasy words about thousands of people being windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon in St. Patrick’s Cathedral praying and carrying on, and thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, then I heard the word “Kennedy” and that brought when I was discovering that not all of the promises me back to the television world again because then would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevo- I realized, well, here I was, in pain. cable and that it had counted after all, every evasion So I was shot at my place of business: Andy Warhol and ever procrastination, every word, all of it. Enterprises. At that point, in 1968, Andy Warhol En- That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? terprises consisted of a few people who worked for Now when New York comes back to me it comes me on a fairly regular basis, a lot of what you might in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I call free-lancers who worked on specific projects, sometimes wish that memory would effect the dis- and a lot of “superstars” or “hyperstars” or whatever tortion with which it is commonly credited. For a you can call all the people who are very talented but lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume whose talents are hard to define and almost impos- called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps,

Andy Warhol 35 36 Joan Didion sible to market. That was the “staff” of Andy Warhol and now the slightest trace of either can short-cir- Enterprises in those days. An interviewer asked me a cuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can lot of questions about how I ran my office and I tried I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling to explain to him that I don’t really run it, it runs me. back into the past, or the particular mixture of spic- I used a lot of phrases like “bring home the bacon” so es used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab he didn’t really understand what I was talking about. boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once The whole time I was in the hospital, the stuff kept shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory on doing things, so I realized I really did have. a ki- stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the netic business, because it was going on without me. same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth I liked realizing that, because I had by that time de- cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in cided that business was the best art. 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought Business art is the step that comes after Art. I start- about the same time. ed as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young busmess artist. After I did the thing called “art” or in New York have the same scenes in our home whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a During the hippie era people put down the idea of few other people who had the same trouble, and we business-they’d say, “ Money is bad: “ and “Working would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink is bad,” but making money is art and working is art with no ice and then go home in the early morning, and good business is the best art. when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained In the beginning not everything in Andy Warhol in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising Enterprises was organized too well. We went from taxis still had their headlights on and the only color art right into business when we made an agreement was the red and green of traffic signals. The White to provide a certain theater with one movie a week. Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall This made our movie-making commercial, and led waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into us from short movies into long movies into feature space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually movies. We learned a little bit about distnbution and happened I had my eyes not on the television screen

Andy Warhol 37 38 Joan Didion soon we started trying to distribute the movie our- but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak selves, but we found out that that was just too hard. I branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the didn’t expect the movies we were doing to be com- monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire mercial. It was enough that the art had gone into the escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and emp- stream of commerce, out mto the real world. It was ty in their perspective. very heady to be able to look and see our movie out It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in there in the real world on a marquee instead of in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps there in the art world. Business art. Art business. The one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed Business Art Business. to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shut- I always like to work on leftovers, doing the leftover tered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could things. Things that were discarded, that everybody sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could knew were no good, I always thought had a great work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a contain- potential to be funny. It was like recycling work. I er of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going always thought there. was a lot of humor in leftovers. to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm When I see an old Ester Williams movie and a hun- of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progres- dred girls are jumping off their swmgs, I think of what sion of four-color closings and two-color closings and the auditions must have been like and about all the black-and-white closings and then The Product, no takes where maybe one girl didn’t have the nerve to abstraction but something which looked effortlessly jump when she was supposed to, and I think about glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and her left over on the swing. So that take of the scene weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs was a leftover on the editing-room floor-an out-take- and layouts, liked working late on the nights the mag- and the gi~l was probably a leftover at that point-she azines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and was probably firedso the whole scene is much funnier waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I than the real scene where everything went right, and could look across town to the weather signal on the the girl who didn’t jump is the star of the out-take. Mutual of New York Building and the lights that al- I’m not saying that popular taste is bad so that ternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler what’s left over from the bad taste is good: I’m say- Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking ing that what’s left over is probably bad, but if you can uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early sum-

Andy Warhol 39 40 Joan Didion take it and make it good or at least interesting, then mer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens you‘re not wasting as much as you would otherwise. in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening You’re recycling work and you’re recycling people, clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming in- and you’re running your business as a byproduct of to full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of other businesses. Of other dJrectly competetive busi- money and summer. nesses, as a matter of fact. So that’s a very ecconomi- Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense cal operating procedure. It’s also the funniest operat- of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the ing procedure because, as I said, leftovers are inher- loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no ently funny. one need know where I was or what I was doing. I Living in gives people real incen- liked walking, from the East River over to the Hud- tives to want things that nobody else wants-to want son and back on brisk days, down around the Village all the leftover things. There are so many people here on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to to compete with that changing your tastes to what her apartment in the West Village when she was out of other people don’t want is your only hope of get- town, and sometimes I would just move down there, ting anything. For instance, in beautiful, sunny days in because by that time the telephone was beginning New York, it gets so crowded outside you cant even to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the see Central Park through all the bodies. But very early rose) and not many people had that number. I remem- on Sunday mornings in horrible rainy weather, when ber one day when someone who did have the West no one wants to get up and no one wants to get out Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, even if they are up, you can go out and walk all over and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger open- and have the streets to yourself and it’s wonderful. ing him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked When we didn’t have the money to do feature mov- to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and ies with thousands of cuts and retakes, etc., I tried gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-rid- to simplify the movie-making procedure, so I made den about spending afternoons that way, because I movies where we used every foot of film that we shot, still had all the afternoons in the world. because it was cheaper, and easier and funnier. Also And even that late in the game I still liked going so we wouldn’t have any leftovers ourselves. Then in to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon 1969 we started editing our movies, but even with parties given by recently married couples who lived

Andy Warhol 41 42 Joan Didion our own movies, I still love the leftovers best. The in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by un- out-takes are all great. I’m scrupulously saving them published or failed writers who served cheap red wine .. I deviate from my philosophy of using leftovers in and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties two areas: (1) my pet, and (2) my food. where all the guests worked for advertising agencies I know I should have gone to the pound for a pet, and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sar- but instead I bought one. It just happened. I saw him di’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived and I. fell in love with him and I bought him, so there by now that I was not one to profit by the experience my emotions made me abandon my style. of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I also have to admit that I can’t tolerate eating left- I stopped believing in new faces and began to un- overs. Food is my great extravagance. I really spoil derstand the lesson in that story, which was that it is myself, but then I try to compensate by scrupulous- distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair. ly sa~ing all of. my food leftovers and bringing them I could not tell you when I began to understand into the office or leaving them in the street and recy- that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was cling them there. My conscience won’t let me throw twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed anything out, even when I don’t want it for myself. to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I As I said, I really spoil myself . in the food area, so my could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central leftovers are often grand—my hairdresser’s cat eats and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s in- pâté at least twice a week. The leftovers usually turn. ability to cope with the help while he missed another out to be. meat because I’ll buy a huge piece of meat, train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in cook it up for dinner, and then right before it’s do- hearing about the advances other people had received ne I’ll break down and have what I wanted for din- from their publishers, about plays which were having ner in the first place—bread and jam. I’m only kid- second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I ding myself when I go through the motions of cook- would like very much if only I would come out and ing protein: all I ever really want is sugar. The rest is meet them. I had already met them, always. There strictly for appearances, i.e., you can’t take a princess were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I to dinner and order a cookie for starters, no matter could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday how much you crave one. People expect you to eat mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aver- protein and you do so they won’t talk. (If you de- sion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of

Andy Warhol 43 44 Joan Didion cided to be stubborn and ordered the cookie, you’d Madison), because I would see women walking York- wind up having to talk about why you want it and shire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some your philosophy of eating a cookie for dinner. And Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could that would be too much trouble, so you order lamb not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the and forget about what you really want.) New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. I did my first tape recording in 1964. I’m trying One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it right now to remember the exact circumstances of would be the Bonwit Teller. what I made mu first tape recording of. I remem- I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those ber who it was of, but I can’t remember why I was I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who carrying a tape recorder around with me that day or was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was even why I had gone out and bought one. I th1nk it not even aware when I was crying and when I was all started because I was trying to do a book. A friend not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese had written me a note saying that everybody we knew laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only was wnttng a book, so that made me want to keep up that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see and do one too so I bought that tape recorder and a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name I taped the most interesttng person I knew at the and address for me, but I did not go. time, Ondine, for a whole day. I was curious about Instead I got married, which as it turned out was all these new people I was meeting who could stay a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still up for weeks at a time without even going to sleep. I could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the thought “These people are so imaginative. I just want mornings and still could not talk to people and still to know what they do, why they’re so imaginative cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before un- and creat1ve, talking all the time, always busy, full of derstood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure energy...how come they can stay up so late and not that I understand now, but I understood that year. be tired,” and pretty soon it would be four days lat- Of course I could not work. I could not even get er. I was determined to stay up all day and all night dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit and tape Ondine, the most talkative and energetic of in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed them all. But somewhere along the line I got tired until my husband would call from his office and say so I had to finish taping the rest of the twenty-four gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could

Andy Warhol 45 46 Joan Didion hours on a couple of other days. So actually, A, my meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at novel, was a fraud, since it was billed as a consec- Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had utive twenty-fourhour tape-recorded “novel,” but been married in January) he called and told me that it was actually taped on a few separate occasions. I he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that used twenty tapes for it because I was using the small he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we cassettes. And right at that potnt some kids came by would go somewhere. the studio and asked if they could do some work so It was three years ago he told me that, and we have I asked them to transcribe and type my novel, and it lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we took them a year and a half to type up one day! That knew in New York think this a curious aberration, seems incredible to me now because I know that if and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate they’d been any good they could have finished it in answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, a week. I would glance over at them sometimes with the answers everyone gives. I talk about how diffi- admiration because they had me convinced that typ- cult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York ing was one of the slowest, most patnstaking jobs in right now, about how much “space” we need, All I the world. Now I realize that what I had were left- mean is that I was very young in New York, and that over typists, but I didn’t know it then. Maybe they at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I just looked being around all the people who hung am not that young anymore. The last time I was in around at the studio. New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill Another thing I couldn’t understand was all those and tired. Many of the people I used to know there people who never slept who were always announcing, had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had “Oh I’m hitting my ninth day and it’s glorious!” So I bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, thought, “Maybe it’s time to do a movie about some- and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los body who sleeps all night. But I only had a camera Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that that I had three minutes on it, so I had to change the night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell camera every three minutes to shoot three minutes. I jasmine all around and we both knew that there was slowed down the movie to make up for all the three no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still minutes I lost changing the film, and we ran it at a kept in New York. There were years when I called Los slower speed to make up for the film I didn’t shoot. Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.

Andy Warhol 47 48 Joan Didion ...

Some people say that Paris is more esthetic than New York. Well, in New York you don’t have time to have an esthetic because it takes half the day to go down- town and half the day to go uptown. Then there’s time in the street, when you run into somebody you haven’t seen in, say, five years, and you play it all on one level. When you see each other and you don’t even lose a beat, that’s when it’s the best. You don’t say “What have you been doing?”—you don’t try to catch up. Maybe you mention that you’re on your way to 8th Street to get a frozen custard and maybe they mention which movie they’re on their way to see, but that’s it. Just a casual check-in. Very light, cool, off-hand, very American. Nobody’s fazed, nobody’s thrown out of time, nobody gets hysterical, nobody loses a beat. That’s when it’s good. And then when somebody asks you whatever happened to so- and-so you just say, “Yes, I saw him having malted on 53rd Street.” Just play it all on one level, like every- thing was yesterday.

Andy Warhol 49 Bob Dylan John Cale 52 Bob Dylan America was changing. I had a feeling of destiny and I was riding the changes. New York was as good a place to be as any. My consciousness was beginning to change, too, change and stretch. One thing for sure, if I wanted to compose folk songs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out. It would have to come on its own from the outside. Without knowing it in so many words, it was beginning to happen.

John Cale 53 1954 Bob Dylan Sometimes Paul Clayton and Ray would talk through the night. They called New York City the capital of the world. They would sit at two tables... either they’d lean back against the wall or forward on the table, drink coffee and glasses of brandy. Clayton, a good friend of Van Ronk’s, was from New Bedford, Mass., the whaling town-he sang a lot of sea shanties, had a Puritan ancestry, but some of his old relatives had been from .the early Virginia families. Clayton had a log cabin outside of Charlottesville, too, where he used to go from time to time. Later on, a few of us went down there and hung around for a week or so in the mountains. The place had no electricity or plumbing or anything; kerosene lamps lit the place at night with reflective mirrors. Ray, who was from Virginia, had ancestors who had fought on both sides of the Civil War. I’d lean back against the wall and shut my eyes. Their voic- es drifting into my head like voices talking from an- other world. They talked about dogs and fishing and I had still not seen anything of my chosen destination, forest fires-love and monarchies, and the Civil War. New York City. I was afraid of it and in awe of it. It Ray had said that New York City was the city that was time to see it in its beauty. Yannis offered to take won the Civil War, came out on top-that the wrong me down for an evening concert at Lincoln Cen- side had lost, that slavery was evil and that the thing ter where his piano piece was being presented along would have died out anyway, Lincoln or no Lincoln. with some works by Cage and Morton Feldman. We I heard him say it and thought it was a mysterious were to make the four-hour round-trip down and and bad thing to say, but if he said it, he said it and back in one night. that’s all there is to it.

John Cale 1963 56 Bob Dylan I was introduced to New York via the elegant, ac- When I woke up later in the day, the place was complished world of European classical music, but I empty. After a while I walked downstairs and left to was really in search of the revolution under the sur- go meet a singing pal of mine, Mark Spoelstra. We face. The bohemian sidelines where new ideas were planned to meet up at a creepy but convenient little nurtured, fought over, rejected, and new styles from coffeehouse on Bleecker Street near Thompson run the indigenous, awkward American avant-garde were by a character called the Dutchman. The Dutchman given voice. resembled Rasputin, the Siberian mad monk. He held My first impression of New York was of the steam the lease on the place. It was mostly a jazz coffeehouse from the street systems pouring out their odours in where Cecil Taylor played a lot. I played there with the summer humidity. It was an apparition of a city Cecil once. We played “The Water Is Wide,” the old that I saw that night. I had a sense of unseen pow- folk song. Cecil could play regular piano if he want- er lurking in the shadows. This was the place I had ed to. I had also played with Billy Higgins and Don dreamed of throughout my childhood, where I could Cherry there. From the coffeehouse, Mark and I were accomplish anything, with the greatest visibility in the going to walk over to Gerde’s Folk City and run over world. It was a city that never slept, that allowed any some songs with Brother John Sellers, a Mississippi activity at any time, and I was as much in love with gospel blues singer who MC’d the shows there. the availability of all things to all people as I was with I was heading to meet Mark, walking along Car- the hidden, unseen things that were to be my milieu mine Street, past the garages, the barbershops and dry for years to come—the underground. cleaners, hardware stores. Radio sounds came shift- Several students at Tanglewood had offered to put ing out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, me up in New York until I got settled and found a the smell of gasoline. The coffeehouses and folk mu- place of my own. For the first couple of months I was sic joints were only a few blocks away, but it seemed sleeping on sofas in he apartments of gay guys. This like miles would go by. was not too comfortable, and also made it hard to When I got to the place, Spoelstra was already there meet the kind of women I was interested in. After a and so was the Dutchman. The Dutchman was lying while I found a loft, but I needed more money than I dead in the doorway of his storefront. There were had to pay the current tenant what is called ‘key mon- splotches of blood on the ice and red lines in the ey’, a deposit to make sure you get the space rather snow, like spiderwebs. The old man who owned the

John Cale 57 58 Bob Dylan than somebody else. The people at Tanglewood gave building had been waiting for him and had stuck a me Leonard Bernstein’s phone number. I went up to knife in him. The Dutchman was still wearing his fur Lincoln Center, introduced myself to him and said, ‘I hat, long brown overcoat and riding boots, and his have this return ticket to London and I just wanted to head was propped up on the stoop under the pearl have your authority to cash it in. I’ve found this loft.’ gray sky. The problem had something to do with the He was gracious and said, ‘Ah, what a wonderful Dutchman refusing to pay his rent and being bellig- idea—a loft!’ erent about it. A lot of times he’d force the old man I said, ‘Take it easy. How do I transfer this?’ out physically. The little old man had taken enough He said, ‘Ah, just send it to Harry up in Boston, and snapped, he must have thrown himself through he’ll take care of it.’ the air like Houdini. It must have taken much skill The ticket was worth enough money in those days and faculty to stick a knife through the heavy brown to get the loft, which was on Lispenard Street just overcoat. Seeing the Dutchman lying there, his long below Canal Street. It was a great loft, strange and brown stringy hair and frosted beard, he looked like unusual, a walk-up. I had no idea how to get garbage a mercenary who could have fallen at Gettysburg. taken out or anything so I ended up paying garbage The old man was sitting inside with the door open, men to walk up three flights. Those were lonely days, facing the sidewalk surrounded by a couple of cops. dark with worry about where the next pennies were His face was misshapen, looked queer formed, almost coming from, and what I could actually do to earn mutilated-like putty in color. His eyes were dead, and money in such a way as to reflect some self-esteem. he had no idea where he was. I was hard-pressed to come to any other conclusion A few people were passing by and not even looking. than what I was already doing. I had to learn to look Spoelstra and I walked away, headed towards Sulli- after myself, grow up, and it was a long, slow, pain- van Street. “It’s sad. Makes you sorry as hell, but what ful process. I was pretty precious, like I’m too good can you do?” he said, not like he expected any an- for this. swer. “Sure it is,” I said. But I wasn’t sorry. The only The avant-garde musician Terry Jennings was one thing that I was thinking was that it was unpleasant of my tenants. He slept at one end of the loft and I and sick and that I might not ever go back into this slept at the other. I had a cat whose name was Mar- joint again, and probably never would. cus. You can’t have a loft without a cat. Terry found The power of the scene somehow jarred my mind,

John Cale 59 60 Bob Dylan out where we could get some ether, which was a lot thoughmaybe because I’d just heard talk about it the of fun. We would go up on the roof and sniff ether. previous night, but it reminded me of some old still It was fine. One day we found the door to the roof images I’d seen of the Civil War. How much did I was open, so I wired the roof to the electricity sup- know about that cataclysmic event? Probably close to ply line and left it. Somebody told us afterwards that nothing. There weren’t any great battles fought out we could have leveled the whole block because Mar- where I grew up. No Chancellorsvilles, Bull Runs, cus carried static electricity and he could just have Fredericksburgs or Peachtree Creeks. What I knew wandered in on the ether exercises and it would have about it, was that it was a war fought about states’ gone whoom! rights and it ended slavery. It seemed odd, but I be- I was supporting myself by working as a clerk at came curious to know more and so I asked Van Ronk, the Orientalia bookshop. This was an invigorating who was as politically minded as anybody, what he experience which both fed my love for books and knew about states’ rights. Van Ronk could talk all day my dreams of travelling to far-off places. Most of my about socialist heavens and political utopias-bourgeois days were spent putting together packages of books democracies and Trotskyites and Marxists, and inter- that had been ordered and sending them off. I’d go national workers’ orders-he could grasp all that stuff to work in the late morning and pack shipments to firmly, but about states’ rights he almost looked be- universities all over the world. By 3 p.m. I’d put them mused. “The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,” on a handcart and wheel them over to the post office: he said, “there’s no mystery to it.” But then again, Van Rawalpindi, Canberra, Buddhist Society of Hamburg. Ronk would never let you forget that he had his own I had got the job through a contact at Tanglewood. way of seeing things. “Look, my man, even if those Orientalia was run by Nick Cernovitch, one of the elite Southern barons would have freed their cap- legends of the New York underground. He was close tives, it wouldn’t have done them any good. We still connected friends with Billy Name. Everybody on would have gone down there and annihilated them, that downtown Lower East Side scene was connected invaded them for their land. It’s called imperialism.” through their work and their lovers. It was an enor- Van Ronk took the Marxist point of view. “It was mous web of networks centred on luminaries like La one big battle between two rival economic systems Monte, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Robert is what it was.” Rauschenberg and Ed Sanders. There were hundreds One thing about Van Ronk, what he said was nev-

John Cale 61 62 Bob Dylan of people on the Lower East Side who called them- er dull or muddy. We sang the same type of songs selves poets and I could see all fifty-seven varieties and all of these songs were originally sung by. sing- of them. Some of them you never heard from again ers who seemed to be groping for words, almost in but some of them were famous because they behaved an alien tongue. I was beginning to feel that maybe like poets and God knows what that was. the language had something to do with causes and Between 9 and 10 September 1963 I was one of ideals that were tied to the circumstances and blood a relay team of pianists, under the direction of John of what happened over a hundred years ago over se- cage, who played Vexations by Eric Satie at The Pock- cession from the Union-at least to those generations et Theatre, 100 Third Avenue near 13th Street, in 18 who were caught in it. All of a sudden, it didn’t seem hours and 40 minutes. that far back. The 180 notes of this 80-second work played 840 Once I was talking to the folks back home and my times. father got on the line, asked me where I was. I told The whole thing was John Cage’s idea. The ad- him that I was in New York City, the capital of the mission was $5, but members of the audience got a world. He said, “That’s a good joke.” But it wasn’t a refund of five cents per twenty minutes, and those joke. New York City was the magnet—the force that who stayed to the bitter end got a g0-cent ~onus. draws objects to it, but take away the magnet and ev- Eric Satie wrote this about his composition, ‘If any- erything will fall apart. one wants to play this motive S40 times, It would be Ray had flowing, wavy, blond hair like Jerry Lee advisable to prepare oneself for it in utmost silence Lewis or Billy Graham, the evangelist-the kind of hair and reverential stillness.’ that preachers had. The kind that the early rock-and- Cage’s approach to whatever was going on was to roll singers used to imitate and want to look like. The break down the barriers between possibility and con- kind that could create a cult. Ray wasn’t a preacher, vention. The performance of Vexations was typical of though, but he knew how to be one and he could what he was about. There were some performers on be funny. He said if he preached to farmers, he’d tell that occasion whose approach was very formal and them about plowing the furrows with seeds of love others who weren’t. There was always one person per- and then reaping the harvest of salvation. He could forming, one waiting to perform and one counting. preach to businessmen, too. He would say stuff like, We’d sit there with a notebook counting the bars in “Sisters and brothers, there’s no profit in trading in

John Cale 63 64 Bob Dylan this 25-hour marathon piece. The fact that the score sin! Everlasting life is not bought and sold.” He had a had at the bottom, ‘Repeat 6SS times’ was enough sermon for just about anybody. Ray was a Southerner to trouble anybody. But Cage had a way of making and made no bones about it, but he would have been everyone under stand why they were doing things antislavery as much as he would have been antiunion. and, more importantly, what their role was. “Slavery should have been outlawed from the start,” Cage reinforced ideas more than he instilled them. he said. “It was diabolical. Slave power makes it im- He picked up on the essential feeling I had that chaos possible for free workers to make a decent living- it isn’t something to be afraid of, and showed me that had to be destroyed.” Ray was pragmatic. Sometimes it really is very comforting in its way. His view was it was as if he had no heart or soul. that if chaos is the natural state of the universe, then There were about five or six rooms in the apart- we should accept that it is, instead of trying to im- ment. In one of them was this magnificent rolltop pose some sort of artificial regime on it. ‘Don’t give desk, sturdy looking, almost indestructible-oak wood yourself a head ache trying to structure things too with secret drawers and a double sided clock on the much,’ he used to say. mantel, carved nymphs and a medallion of Miner- Another of my idols was Marcel Duchamp, because va-mechanical devices to release hidden drawers, up- he quit art to play chess. He was somebody who knew per side panels and gilt bronze mounts emblematic when to stop. Everything that he did was a hard state- of mathematics and astronomy. It was incredible. I ment, very impressive, and this was much more at- sat down at it, firm footed, and pulled out a sheet of tractive to me than being a Schoenberg or a Webern. paper and dashed off a letter to my cousin Reenie. La Monte Young, the second major influence on Reenie and I were pretty close growing up-we rode me, is an important American composer whose work the same bicycle, one of those Schwinns with coaster has been infrequently heard by his own choice. His brakes. Sometimes she’d come along with me when I 1958 ‘Trio for Strings’, which inspired composers like played at different places, even embroidered a shirt for Philip Glass and Steve Reich, has, for example, never me to play in that was pretty flashy, · and she sewed been released on record. He was perhaps the best part stripes of ribbon down the sides of a pair of pants. of my education and my introduction to musical dis- One time she asked me why I was using a differ- cipline. Shortly after arriving in New York I made a ent name when I played, especially in the neighbor- pilgrimage to his place on the Lower East Side. Young ing towns. Like, didn’t I want people to know who

John Cale 65 66 Bob Dylan and his wife, Marion Zazeela, lived in a large loft. The I was? “Who’s Elston Gunn?” she asked. “That’s not Youngs, who married in 1963, shared an interest in you, is it?” “Ah,” I said, “you’ll see.” The Elston Gunn keeping turtles, making yogurt and Middle Eastern name thing was only temporary. What I was going to cooking. Supra-beings who feasted on organic food, do as soon as I left home was just call myself Robert La Monte and Marion had a habit of completing each Allen. As far as I was concerned, that was who I was- other’s sentences. His group, the Theatre of Eternal that’s what my parents named me. It sounded like the Music, rehearsed at night for weeks be(ore each per- name of a Scottish king and I liked it. There was little formance. He was so flattered that a classical student of my identity that wasn’t in it. What kind of con- had come all the way from Wales to sit at his feet that fused me later was seeing an article in a Downbeat he immediately invited me to come back and play magazine with a story about a West Coast saxophone with them. The Theatre of Eternal Music consisted player named David Allyn. I had suspected that the of La Monte, Marion, Tony Conrad, Terry Riley, my- musician had changed the spelling of Allen to Allyn. self, and, at different times, Angus MacLise and the I could see why. It looked more exotic, more inscru- mathematician Dennis Johnson. We created a kind of table. I was going to do this, too. Instead of Robert music that nobody else in the world was making and Allen it would he Robert Allyn. Then sometime later, that nobody had ever heard before. unexpectedly, I’d seen some poems by Dylan Thom- Working with the Theatre of Eternal Music, Tony as. Dylan and Allyn sounded similar. Robert Dylan. and I formed the Dream Syndicate, which consisted Robert Allyn. I couldn’t decide-the letter D came on of two amplified voices, an amplified violin and my stronger. But Robert Dylan didn’t look or sound as amplified viola. The concept of the group was to sus- good as Robert Allyn. People had always called me tain notes for two hours at a time. La Monte would either Robert or Bobby, hut Bobby Dylan sound- hold the lowest notes, I would hold the next three on ed too skittish to me and besides, there already was a my viola, his wife Marion would hold the next note Bobby Darin, a Bobby Vee, a Bobby Rydell, a Bobby and Tony Conrad would hold the top note. That was Neely and a lot of other Bohhys. Bob Dylan looked my first group experience and what an experience it and sounded better than Bob Allyn. The first time I was! It was so different. The tapes of it are art objects. was asked my name in the Twin Cities, I instinctive- Some people who came to our concerts know what ly and automatically without thinking simply said, it was like, but it is the only example of that kind of “Bob Dylan.”

John Cale 67 68 Bob Dylan music in the world. The Indians use the drone also, but Now, I had to get used to people calling me Bob. they use a totally different tuning system and though I’d never been called that before, and it took me some they attempt a scientific approach, they don’t really time to respond to people who called me that. As far have it buttoned down the way we did. as Bobby Zimmerman goes, I’m going to give this La Monte was dealing pounds of marijuana and to you right straight and you can check it out. One was very proud of the quality. That was where I had of the early presidents of the San Bernardino Angels my first encounter with marijuana. Everybody was was Bobby Zimmerman, and he was killed in 1964 smoking. The whole first period of La Monte’s re- on the Bass Lake run. The muffler fell off his hike, he lationship with me was very amusing because there made aU-turn to retrieve it in front of the pack and was a lot of smoking, a lot of smiling, a lot of nodding was instantly killed. That person is gone. That was heads. Nobody understood a word I said because of the end of him. I finished the letter to Reenie and my Welsh accent. (No wonder I had no fucking sex!) signed it Bobby. That’s how she knew me and always But when they introduced me to marijuana, it was would. Spelling is important. If I would have had to all right. I giggled. There was a lot of giggling going choose between Robert Dillon or Robert Allyn, I on. But we were dead serious about our work. would have picked Robert Allyn, because it looked The members of the Dream Syndicate, motivated better in print. The name Bob Allyn never would by a scientific and mystical fascination with sound, have worked-sounded like a used-car salesman. I’d spent long hours in rehearsals learning to provide suspected that Dylan must have been Dillon at one sustained meditative drones and chants. Their rig- time and that that guy changed the spelling, too, but orous style served to discipline me and developed there was no way to prove it. my knowledge of the just intonation system. I also Speaking of Bobbys, my old friend and fellow per- learned to use my viola in a new amplified way which former Bobby Vee had a new song out on the charts would lead to the powerful droning effect that is so called “Take Good Care of My Baby.” Bobby Vee was strong in the first two Velvet Underground records. from Fargo, North Dakota, raised not too far from ... me. In the summer of ‘59 he had a regional hit record out called “Suzie Baby” on a local label. His hand was The curator of twentieth-century art at the Met- called The Shadows and I had hitchhiked out there ropolitan Museum, Henry Geldzahler, invited the and talked my way into joining his group as a piano

John Cale 69 70 Bob Dylan Theatre of Eternal Music to perform at his birthday player on some of his local gigs, one in the basement party in his 79th Street apartment. He took the mat- of a church. I played a few shows with him, hut he tress off his loft bed and four of us sat up there and really didn’t need a piano player and, besides, it was played this outrageous music. Jackie Kennedy was hard fmding a piano that was in tune in the halls that there, and so was Andy Warhol. he played. At Tony Conrad’s apartment on 56 Ludlow Street, Bobby Vee and me had a lot in common, even he, Jack Smith and I toiled over the tape machines though our paths would take such different direc- late into the night forging the soundtracks to Jack’s tions. We had the same musical history and came classic avant-garde films Flaming Creatures and Nor- from the same place at the same point of time. He mal Love. Tony worked closely with Jack on the mu- had gotten out of the Midwest, too, and had made it sic for his films. We would sit around Ludlow Street to Hollywood. Bobby had a metallic, edgy tone to his with Angus MacLise, at loose ends but not really, voice and it was as musical as a silver bell, like Bud- slowly inching up to the point when we could re- dy Holly’s, only deeper. When I knew him, he was a cord something. It seemed there was always a mag- great rockabilly singer and now he had crossed over ical moment when Angus, who had been wordless and was a pop star. He recorded for Liberty Records since entering the room, would pick up his tom-toms and was having one Top 40 hit after another. He’d and start flicking away at a rhythm, then Tony would still be having songs hit the charts even right along- get a level, on bowed guitar, I would strum anoth- side The Beatles when they invaded the country. His er guitar or play viola, Jack would have a coughing current song, “Take Good Care of My Baby,” was as fit when the tape was running or else he would get slick as ever. the giggles, we would try to control ourselves, and I wanted to see him again, so I took the D train then he would start to speak in that thin, whiny, nasal out to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Flatbush tone of his, barely audible but nevertheless presented Avenue where he was appearing with The Shirelles, as complementary to the noises coming from us, and Danny and the Juniors, Jackie Wilson, Ben E. King, suitably twisted too. Maxine Brown, and some others. He was on the top Jack had the unfailing support of the art collector of the heap now. It seemed like so much had hap- Isobel Eberstadt for his films. She would appear as an pened to him in such a short time. Bobby came out apparition of elegance in a white Rolls-Royce Sil- to see me, was as down-to-earth as ever, was wear-

John Cale 71 72 Bob Dylan ver Cloud but would only stay long enough to hear ing a shiny silk suit and narrow tie, seemed genuine- Jack’s laments about the courts and his film-making, ly glad to see me, didn’t even act surprised. We talk- before being whisked away again by the chauffeur. ed for a little while. He asked me about New York, One afternoon Jack arrived in and embarked on a what it was like to be here. “Lot of walking. Got to tale of having been given for an undisclosed large keep your feet in good shape,” I said. sum which would pay for the new tape recorder he I told him I was playing in the folk clubs, but it was wanted Tony to use. We hurried off to the rarefied impossible to give him any indication of what it was atmosphere Ferrograph Company’s Manhattan dis- all about. His only reference would have been The tribution Centre. Having purchased the machine in Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, stuff like that. He’d be- suitably hushed tones, we found it weighed in at 108 come a crowd pleaser in the pop world. As for myself, pounds. It took every molecule of strength from our I had nothing against pop songs, but the definition diet of chicken giblets, wood shavings and oatmeal of pop was changing. They just didn’t seem to be as products to get it back to the apartment by subway good as they used to be. I loved songs like “Without in the rush hour. a Song,” “Old Man River,” “Stardust” and hundreds Tony kept his tape machines and small array of of others. My favorite of all the new ones was “Moon electronic equipment in a neatly organized bank of River.” I could sing that in my sleep. My Huckleber- shelves along with a number of very brittle old ac- ry friend, too, was up there, waiting ‘round the bend etate reel-to-reel tapes and a vast record collection. maybe on 14th Street. At Ray’s, where there weren’t Here we would concoct almost nightly our Franken- many folk records, I used to play the phenomenal steinian experiments in electronic music. One such “Ebb Tide” by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never experiment was aimed at creating various kinds of failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mysti- reverb chambers, each from a different element - wa- fying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I ter, metal, etc. Some would definitely border on the could hear everything in his voice-death, God and ridiculous, such as trying to make a tuned chamber the universe, everything. I had other things to do, from raising and lowering the level of water in a metal though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much. bucket, another was to use the bed spring. The music Standing there with Bobby, I didn’t want to act self- would sometimes evolve from what was required by ishly on his time so we said good-bye and I walked our particular projects at the time. Jack Smith’s sec- down the side of the theater and out through one

John Cale 73 74 Bob Dylan ond film, Normal Love, starred Andy Warhol’s first of the side doors. There were throngs of young girls drag-queen superstar, Maria Montez, who lived two waiting for him in the cold outside the building. I floors below in a gaudily decorated grotto of colour. cut back out through them into the press of cabs and Some of the dialogue or voice-overs would be do- private cars plowing slowly through the icy streets ne away from the film and might contain incidental and headed back to the subway station. I wouldn’t see music performed simultaneously. It was suitably oily, Bobby Vee again for another thirty years, and though decadent music with an overwhelmingly powerful things would be a lot different, I’d always thought of Moroccan flavour to it. After much struggle with him as a brother. Every time I’d see his name some- the problem, of overdubbing on a two-track Revere where, it was like he was in the room. tape recorder, Tony built a truly remarkable little de- Greenwich Village was full of folk clubs, bars and vice out of a quaint mixture of antique parts soldered coffeehouses, and those of us who played them all together that allowed him to combine or add up to played the oldtimey folk songs, rural blues and dance seven layers or parts over an original signal with the tunes. There were a few who wrote their own songs, equivalent loss of quality in the end result. In effect, like Toni Paxton and Len Chandler and because they it was a mixer (unheard of in 1963) and we record- used old melodies with new words they were pret- ed a few sessions in the stifling heat of that top-floor ty much accepted. Both Len and Tom wrote topical tenement. The mixer was useful up to a point, but songs-songs where you’d pick articles out of news- the recording problems were only really overcome papers, fractured, demented stuff-some nun getting by a simple, straightforward, unified performance. married, a high school teacher taking a flying leap One such performance that was memorable occurred off the Brooklyn Bridge, tourists who robbed a gas when Jack decided to improvise a spoken text while station, Broadway beauty being beaten and left in the Tony and I played violin and viola. snow, things like that. Len could usually fashion some When it appeared in 1963, quite a stir was made song out of all that, found some kind of angle. Tom’s by Flaming Creatures and its depiction of frontal nu- songs were topical, too, even though his most famous dity, which led to its being banned. It was therefore song, “Last Thing on My Mind,” was a yearning ro- the quintessential underground phenomenon and no mantic ballad. I wrote a couple and slipped them in- doubt gave the movement its strong sense of identity. to my repertoire but really didn’t think they were Jonas Mekas, who with Anthology Film Archives here nor there.

John Cale 75 76 Bob Dylan had brought some focus to the disarray of the Low- I had been singing a lot of topical songs, anyway. er East Side poets’ and artists’ circle, pronounced the Songs about real events were always topical. You could movement alive and well with the Festival of Films usually fmd some kind of point of view in it, though, he held at the Cinematheque on 42nd Street in 1965. and take it for what it was worth, and the writer Gregory Markopoulos, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, Pie- doesn’t have to be accurate, could tell you anything ro Heliczer and Andy Warhol were all represented. All and you’re going to believe it. worked on the Lower East Side, and Angus’s drum- Billy Gashade, the man who presumably wrote the ming with La Monte gave it an extremely bohemian Jesse James ballad, makes you believe that Jesse robbed flair. The work was in a direct descent from the Beats, from the rich and gave to the poor and was shot down but with a more fervid appreciation of ‘modernity’ or by a “dirty little coward.” In the song, Jesse robs banks pop art. Some of it emerged as technological toys - and gives the money to the destitute and in the end Nam June Paik’s boxes, Marion Zazeela’s light piec- is betrayed by a friend. By all accounts, though, James es—while others, like Walter de Maria, seemed op- was a bloodthirsty killer who was anything but the posed to modernity and had their focus on religion Robin Hood sung about in the song. But Billy Ga- and farce. It was a very energetic, ‘flaming’ period. shade has the last word and he spins it around. All participants in this Lower East Side phenom- Topical songs weren’t protest songs. The term “pro- enon enjoyed throwing their lot in with any myr- test singer” didn’t exist any more than the term “sing- iad combinations of musicians, poets, dancers, who ersongwriter.” You were a performer or you weren’t, would show up playing in the most improper venues that was about it-a folksinger or not one. “Songs o f —sidewalks, rooftops, jails, piers. On any given night dissent” was a term people used but even that was rare. word would come of another gathering in another I tried to explain later that I didn’t think I was a pro- location just as unsuitable as the last. The idea seemed test singer, that there’d been a screwup. I didn’t think to be to redefine ‘spontaneous’. Films were project- I was protesting anything any more than I thought ed on gauze which doubled as sets for dancing with that Woody Guthrie songs were protesting anything. I music—as likely to be interrupted by poetry reading didn’t think of Woody as a protest singer. If he is one, as dancing was by film. The noise of drone was heard then so is Sleepy John Estes and Jelly Roll Morton. in the streets. ‘Found art’ was as likely to turn into a What I was hearing pretty regularly, though, were re- poem as a sculpture. bellion songs and those really moved me. The Clan-

John Cale 77 78 Bob Dylan ... cy Brothers Tom, Paddy and Liam-and their buddy Tommy Makem sang them all the time. Each night we were riveted to AM radio, station I got to be friends with Liam and began going 1010 WINS, with Murray the K, who called himself after-hours to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson the fifth Beatle and filled his show with English rock. Street, which was mainly an Irish bar frequented And while we walked to La Monte’s loft we were mostly by guys from the old country. All through pelted with stones by the local kids who yelled at the night they would sing drinking songs, country us because of our long hair. The crossover point was ballads and rousing rebel songs that would lift the the Everly Brothers record ‘Dream’, which we would roof. The rebellion songs were a really serious thing. listen to ad nauseam to hear the ‘differencetones’ in The language was flashy and provocative-a lot of ac- the opening bars. We were pretty confused. How on tion in the words, all sung with great gusto. The sing- earth could the Everly Brothers have known about er always had a merry light in his eye, had to have it. theories of sound in Nashville? Still, the excitement I loved these songs and could still hear them in my of the Stones arriving and the Beatles at Shea Stadi- head long after and into the next day. They weren’t um was palpable on the Lower East Side. It made a protest songs, though, they were rebel ballads even future in the avant-garde even more dim. in a simple, melodic wooing ballad there’d he rebel- During the week I would travel to La Monte’s new lion waiting around the corner. You couldn’t escape apartment on Church Street, where he would even- it. There were songs like that in my repertoire, too, tually come to sit in and sing with the electrified vi- where something lovely was suddenly upturned, but olin and viola. I say ‘eventually’ because he was under instead of rebellion showing up it would be death it- such stress to raise funds for his defence in the drug self, the Grim Reaper. Rebellion spoke to me louder. case that very little opportunity arrived for concerts. The rebel was alive and well, romantic and honorable. The price for such concerts escalated also, and so very The Grim Reaper wasn’t like that. few responses were had. The electric component of La I was beginning to think I might want to change Monte’s group had driven the theory and style of the over. The Irish landscape wasn’t too much like the Dream Syndicate. Tony’s introduction of the electric American landscape, though, so I’d have to find some pick-up to the bowed guitar and subsequently the cuneiform tablets-some archaic grail to lighten the viola and violin had for ever altered the raga-blues- way. I had grasped the idea of what kind of songs I

John Cale 79 80 Bob Dylan type music that was prevalent when I first arrived. wanted to write, I just didn’t know how to do it yet. The same force for change that appeared in the I did everything fast. Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast early sixties in Tribeca was also at work on Ludlow and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast. I needed Street. The work, however spasmodic, that went on to slow my mind down if I was going to be a com- around Jack Smith’s films and Tony was a constant poser with anything to say. I couldn’t exactly put in reminder that barriers needed to be broken and new words what I was looking for, but I began searching sensibilities defined. Much of this work happened in in principle for it, over at the New York Public Li- a desultory way, alternately rambling and improvi- brary, a monumental building with marble floors and satory, the context and theory coming later. It was a walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A private language no one else understood. Unique to building that radiates triumph and glory when you the members of the group, and allowing the greatest walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I latitude for each of us to express ourselves. started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm When I first met Lou Reed at the beginning of from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was 1965, he was a 22-year-old at Pickwick like. I wasn’t so much interested in the issues as in- Records in Long Island City, and I was a 22-year-old trigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. avant-garde classical musician in La Monte Young’s Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Dai- Theatre of Eternal Music. We were introduced by ly Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like a Pickwick producer, Terry Phillips, who thought I the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald was a pop musician because I had long hair. He asked and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn’t like it was another me, Tony Conrad and a friend, the sculptor Walter world, but the same one only with more urgency, and de Maria, to form a band with Lou called the Prim- the issue of slavery wasn’t the only concern. There itives. Phillips wanted to publicize a song Lou · had were news items about reform movements, antigam- written and recorded in a back room, and Pickwick bling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, had released as a single, ‘The Ostrich’, by a fictitious slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious re- band, the Primitives. vivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers them- The pop programme American Bandstand want- selves could explode and lightning will burn and ev- ed them perform this song on TV, so Phillips was erybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, forced to put an appropriate-looking band together. quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plan-

John Cale 81 82 Bob Dylan We thought it would be fun, and as a lark spent a cou- tation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding ple of weekends playing the TV show and a few oth- and selling their own children. In the Northern cit- er East Coast gigs. Even though the record bombed, ies, there’s a lot of discontent and debt is piled high the experience of being in a rock band, however er- and seems out of control. The plantation aristocracy satz, gave Lou and me the opportunity to connect. run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Lou played some songs he had written on his own, Roman republic where an elite group of characters ‘Heroin’ and ‘Waiting for My Man’, on an acoustic rule supposedly for the good of all. They’ve got saw- guitar as if they were folk songs. I missed the point be- mills, gristmills, distilleries, country stores, et cetera. cause I hated folk songs, and it was not until he forced Every state of mind opposed by another...Christian me to read the lyrics that I realized these were not piety and weird mind philosophies turned on their Joan Baez songs. He was writing about things other heads. Fiery orators, like William Lloyd Garrison, a people weren’t. These lyrics were literate, well-ex- conspicuous abolitionist from Boston who even has pressed, tough, novelistic impressions of life. I recog- his own newspaper. There are riots in Memphis and nized a tremendous literary quality in his songs, which in New Orleans. There’s a riot in New York where fascinated me - he had a careful ear and was cautious two hundred people are killed outside of the Met- with his words. I had no real knowledge of rock mu- ropolitan Opera House because an English actor has sic at that time, so I focused on the literary aspect. taken the place of an American one. Anti-slave labor My first impressions of Lou were of a high-strung, advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo intelligent fragile college kid in a polo neck sweater, and Cleveland, that if the Southern states are allowed rumpled jeans and loafers. He had been around and to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be was bruised, trembling, quiet and insecure. He lived forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots, in Freeport, Long Island, with his parents, who kept too. Lincoln comes into the picture in the late 1850s. him on a tight rein. In fact, he was only allowed to He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon come into Manhattan on the weekend; for the rest or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. of the week he was grounded. He was also seeing a Nobody takes him seriously. It’s impossible to con- psychiatrist who prescribed a tranquillizer called Plac- ceive that he would become the father figure that he idyl. When I asked why, he said, ‘I think I’m crazy.’ I is today. You wonder how people so united by geog- told him, ‘Fuck, you’re not crazy.’ I didn’t believe in raphy and religious ideals could become such bitter

John Cale 83 84 Bob Dylan schizophrenia. All I saw in it was a different way of enemies. After a while you become aware of noth- seeing things. Anyway, I could not believe somebody ing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, who was writing those songs could be crazy. evil for evil, the common destiny of the human be- Lou came from a folk background but rock and ing getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral roll was also there really deep down. His first-per- song, but there’s a certain imperfection in the themes, son songs were astounding because he had to iden- an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded tify with the position of the narrator. People would characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good. say, ‘My God, “Heroin” is glorifying drug taking!’ In No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. fact, it’s about a person talking about his disappoint- ment with life and his conviction that he has now got the solution. Contradictory viewpoints are import- ant because they show the richness of a character. If you can get that dichotomy in a character, it’s com- pelling. If you can get more than that, you’re amaz- ing. Having those two things presented in simplistic form is really magical. With ‘Heroin’ there are a lot of things going on. There’s the music, there’s the words, and there’s the character. And inside the words are several different characters, so you have all these lay- ers going on, and if you’re really good you can con- trol those layers and make them do several different things. And I thought we could deal with it. Writing songs and actually finding something to sing about was an explosion, and I liked that explosion. I want- ed to go through that, because I thought it would be cathartic and would help me come to terms with recent developments, and with America in general. At the time, Lou was particularly depressed. Apart

John Cale 85 86 Bob Dylan from being permanently numbed by Placidyl, he was bitter because Terry Phillips wouldn’t let him record his own songs, even though Pickwick churned out countless schlock pop albums. Lou had these songs and I was interested in getting a band going, so I said, ‘Fuck them, if they don’t want to do it, we’ll do it ourselves.’ He couldn’t believe it. However, the more he said he didn’t believe it, the more drive it gave me to show him what we could do. We got together and started playing the songs for fun. I tried to tell him exactly what had happened to me with La Monte, and explained that finding a platform on which to put something was a start. We improvised and I showed him what La Monte would do with one-note chords and detuning. I would fit the things Lou played right into my world. He was from the other world of music and he fitted me perfectly, we were made for each oth- er. It was so natural. I’d show him something that he could do and he seemed constantly astounded by my ability to bring these things out in him. I felt a little taken aback, but when I first met him he had a great deal of ability that was waiting to get tapped. I tried to be supportive and show him what he was capable of doing. Lou was really low on energy at the time. It was a challenge to help somebody who was depressed by the lack of response he was getting, yet showing a determination to go on. So I found myself in a Sven-

John Cale 87 Patti Smith galian position from the point of view of effort. At the same time, Lou could play a lot of different things. l’d never been next to somebody who had blues training and knowledge of country-and-west- ern picking. There was a lot of stuff that I was inter- ested in. One of the things he did was sit down and just make up songs. At the drop of a hat he would be singing about how we would go and see Walter de Maria in his loft and so on. It was riveting. He had such an ease with language. There were certain characters I had in mind all along who I thought would be able to succeed in New York. In Lou Reed I found one of these char- acters. To me, he was the kind of person who would survive in New York, and I wanted to learn from him. You might even say that learning was what I really wanted to do, more than achieve. Lou Reed was the first person in America with whom I connected both by example and shared experience. This was a eme- tine of the minds on literature and other aspects of art. Lou was the first person of my own age whom I had a terrific exchange with. At first it was mainly about literature and classical archetypes. Lou turned me on to the novel Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby. Lou’s thing was going straight to the subconscious. He was able to talk about a variety of things that were very fresh and original, and he loved conversation. It was the time of the Beatles. I stopped working with

John Cale 89 90 Patti Smith La Monte and dove into working with Lou. I was terrifically excited by the possibility of combining what I had been doing with La Monte with what I was doing with Lou and finding a commercial out- let. My collaboration with Lou simply overtook my community of interests with La Monte ...

When Lou and I entered Warhol’s looking-glass world at the silver Factory on West 47th Street, I had no idea what we were in for at all. The second day we went there, Andy sprang his first surprise on us. He had another member of the band, as he saw it, in tow. This was a diva named Nico who had just come over from London, where the Rolling Stones’ manag- er Andrew Loog Oldham had made a single with her and Bob Dylan had given her a song, ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine’. Nico was a knockout, but so was Andy’s My immediate concern was where to go next, and proposal. He wanted Nico to front the band! what to do when I got there. I held to the hope that Nico intended to sing all the songs and, at first, I was an artist, though I knew I would never be able looked upon us as a hired backup band. We had a dif- to afford art school and had to make a living. There ferent idea. However, remarkably quickly, and as a sign was nothing to keep me home, no prospects and no of Warhol’s amazing ability to overcome objections and sense of community. My parents had raised us in an get things done his way, we agreed to let Nico sing a atmosphere of religious dialogue, of compassion, of few songs and otherwise stand on the stage looking civil rights, but the general feel of rural South Jersey unenthusiastic and play the tambourine. She was tone was hardly pro-artist. My few comrades had moved deaf and had an abrasive voice, but it turned out to be to New York to write poetry and study art and I felt great casting. She had the same aura Andy had. very much alone.

John Cale 91 1967 Patti Smith Nico had a style that she had picked up from Elia I had found solace in Arthur Rimbaud, whom I Kazan who taUght her at the Actors Studio: ‘Take had come upon in a bookstall across from the bus de- your time. Create your own time.’ And she did with a pot in Philadelphia when I was sixteen. His haughty vengeance. You would be in a group that was having gaze reached mine from the cover of Illuminations. a conversation and somebody would ask her a ques- He possessed an irreverent intelligence that ignited tion and get no immediate answer. Then the conver- me, and I embraced him as compatriot, kin, and even sation would move on. About two minutes later she secret love. Not having the ninety-nine cents to buy would interrupt, and reply to the question that had the book, I pocketed it. been asked before. Everybody would say, ‘What?’ And Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that then they realized, Ah, Nico. I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My There was a certain way in which the four of us unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything worked together. The way we’d always start, I would I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored sit around and play on my own and Lou would come with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was around and I’d say, ‘Here, look, I’ve got this riff.’ And harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Com- then Lou would do the same to me. We would jam munist for reading a book in a foreign language, they and move from instrument to instrument while the threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce jam was gOing on. That approach became part of him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It what was gOing on on stage. Lou was happy writ- was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became ing songs that Moe and Sterling could relate to. He my archangel, delivering me from the mundane hor- was happy to have them playing the songs in any way rors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manu- they wanted to play them. I was trying to push this al of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of thing in another direction, to try and have it repre- him added swagger to my step and this could not be sent everything that we were capable of doing, that stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a would allow Sterling his role as an individual, Moe plaid suitcase. We would escape together. her role, Lou his role. ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘Heroin’ and I had my plan. I would seek out friends who were ‘Black Angel’ are the supreme examples where ev- studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. I figured erybody played different thingS but all four together if I placed myself in their environment I could learn give you something unique. from them. When I was laid off in late June from

John Cale 93 94 Patti Smith Not knowing what Lou was gOing to be like from my job in the textbook factory, I took this as a sign day to day was important from a creative point of view to head out. Employment in South Jersey was hard for the band. With everybody else there was an insta- to come by. I was on a waiting list at the Columbia bility but he was one loose cannon who was likely to Records pressing plant in Pitman and the Campbell go off in a very creative way most of the time. I mean, Soup Company in Camden, but the thought of ei- there were a lot of times when I had been going off ther job made me nauseous. I had enough money for and acting a little out of control as well, but I always a one-way ticket. I planned to hit all the bookstores assumed that I was doing it for effect really. in the city. This seemed ideal work to me. My moth- I never lost sight of the idea that our value lay in er, who was a waitress, gave me white wedgies and a the sense of strength we had established before gOing fresh uniform in a plain wrapper. into the Factory. The music that we had worked on “You’ll never make it as a waitress,” she said, “but day in and day out set us apart from everybody else. I’ll stake you anyway.” It was her way of showing her I thought we had something very valuable, a style of support. our own that we had created ourselves, Lou and I, It was a Monday morning on July 3. I maneuvered and Moe and Sterling. It took a lot of work to pre- the tearful goodbyes and walked the mile to Wood- pare for the first album; it took a year of work, but in bury and caught the Broadway bus to Philadelphia, that year of work we got somewhere else. passing through my beloved Camden and nodding We started going up to the Factory daily to take respectfully to the sad exterior of the once-prosper- delivery of our new microphones, amplifiers and in- ous Walt Whitman Hotel. I felt a pang abandoning struments. There was this gigantic Elvis painting up this struggling city, but there was no work for me on the wall; there would be a film going on in the there. They were closing the great shipyard and soon corner. Andy would just hang around. Periodically everyone would be looking for jobs. Princess Radziwill would show up, and all the activity I got off at Market Street and stopped in Nedick’s. I suddenly stopped. Watching Andy operate and seeing slipped a quarter in the jukebox, played two sides by Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Donovan, Nina Simone, and had a farewell doughnut and cof- and all these people coming into the Factory was as- fee. I crossed over to Filbert Street to the bus terminal tonishing, It seemed to be the hub of the universe. across from the bookstall that I had haunted for the On 10 January Andy took us up to the swanky last few years. I paused before the spot where I had

John Cale 95 96 Patti Smith Delmonico’s Hotel on Park Avenue to play in front pocketed my Rimbaud. In its place was a battered of some films he was showing at a dinner party for a copy of Love on the Left Bank with grainy black- convention of psychiatrists. By then, Warhol had the and-white shots of Paris nightlife in the late fifties. basic elements of his act together. He would project The photographs of the beautiful Vali Myers, with two black and white films next to each other on a her wild hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, dancing on the white wall or screen. We would stand directly in front streets of the Latin Quarter deeply impressed me. I of it with our amplifiers and microphones and play did not swipe the book, but kept her image in mind. our songs as loudly as possible. Nico did her three It was a big blow that the fare to New York had songs, Lou did the rest. In front of us Gerard Malanga nearly doubled since last I’d traveled. I was unable to and Edie Sedgwick danced with wild banshee aban- buy my ticket. I went into a phone booth to think. don, acting out parts of the song images. It was a real Clark Kent moment. I thought of call- From then onwards, it was taken for granted that ing my sister although I was too ashamed to return we would now spend our days at the Factory, where home. But there on the shelf beneath the telephone, we would meet in the late afternoon to rehearse lying on thick yellow pages, was~ white patent purse. and gather for the evening’s activities, which usual- It contained a locket and thirty-two dollars, almost a ly meant following Andy around to cocktail parties, week’s paycheck at my last job. art openings, dinner parties, party parties, nightclubs, Against my better judgment, I took the money but theatres, movies. As we flew around the city we were I left the purse on the ticket counter in the hopes never less than ten and often as many as twenty. We that the owner would at least retrieve the locket. didn’t so much attend parties as invade them, and An- There was nothing in it that revealed her identity. I dy’s coterie were not fakes. No sooner had we en- can only thank, as I have within myself many times tered somebody’s house than we would be combing through the years, this unknown benefactor. She was the bathroom for prescription drugs and checking the one who gave me the last piece of encouragement, out the cupboards for free clothes. a thief’s good-luck sign. I accepted the grant of the It was a moveable feast. We all went en masse ev- small white purse as the hand of fate pushing me on. erywhere. It was like having a family all of a sudden At twenty years old, I boarded the bus. I wore my and everybody enjoyed everybody else in an arm’s- dungarees, black turtleneck, and the old gray raincoat len,gth kind of way. Paul would always be the one I had bought in Camden. My small suitcase, yellow-

John Cale 97 98 Patti Smith most grounded. But I thought it was heaven. I mean, I and-red plaid, held some drawing pencils, a notebook, thought that somebody was in charEe here. From the Illuminations, a few pieces of clothing, and pictures time that Barbara Rubin came down and brought us of my siblings. I was superstitious. Today was a Mon- up to the Factory, every day there was an agenda. It day; I was born on Monday. It was a good day to ar- went on until or 2 a.m., and often continued around rive in New York City. No one expected me. Every- the clock: one party after another. There was never a thing awaited me. dull moment, I was always enthralled and exhilarated, I immediately took the subway from Port Authority but also a little frightened of the jet set. And so, very to Jay Street and Borough Hall, then to Hoyt-Scher- cautiously, I thought, Keep your eye on the day job merhorn and DeKalb Avenue. It was a sunny after- and Eet some work done. Work was really import- noon. I was hoping my friends might put me up until ant for everybody. I could find a place of my own. I went to the brown- Andy was constantly on Obetrol, a pink diet pill. stone at the address I had, but they had moved. The When I first went up to the Factory there was labour new tenant was polite. He motioned toward a room going on all the time, making silkscreens or whatev- at the rear of the flat and suggested that his roommate er. They were there early and they were always doing might know the new address. somethinE. That atmosphere was an important part I walked into the room. On a simple iron bed, a of Andy’s make-up. boy was sleeping. He was pale and slim with mass- Lou was very suspicious of Andy, but on the other es of dark curls, lying bare-chested with strands of hand, he was in awe of him. Andy was not interested beads around his neck. I stood there. He opened his in music, he was interested in people, so he latched eyes and smiled. on to Lou because he was this creature of another When I told him of my plight, he rose in one mo- part of New York life that he didn’t have at the Fac- tion, put on his huaraches and a white T- shirt, and tory, an example of a Long Island punk. Lou would beckoned me to follow him. be completely mystified by somebody like Andy who I watched him as he walked ahead, leading the way didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but who could with a light-footed gait, slightly bowlegged. I noticed be such a jackal with all his people. Whereas Lou’s his hands as he tapped his fingers against his thigh. I whole modus operandi was to get people’s attention had never seen anyone like him. He delivered me to by wounding them. another brownstone on Clinton Avenue, gave a little

John Cale 99 100 Patti Smith It took me about a year to understand what Andy farewell salute, smiled, and was on his way. was about. When I first went there I was aware of the The day wore on. I waited for my friends. As fortune outrageous side but I was very suspicious of the intel- would have it, they did not return. That night, having lectual background to his art. So much of what An- nowhere to go, I fell asleep on their red stoop. When dy did seemed to be a diluted version of the down- I awoke, it was Independence Day, my first away from town avant-garde scene. La Monte had VIeWed An- home with the familiar parade, veterans’ picnic, and dy’s dollar bills and Elvises and soup cans with Erave fireworks display. I felt a restless agitation in the air. suspicion. La ~onte’s work was about long duration, Packs of children threw firecrackers that exploded at and Andy dealt in repetition. We had I. e feelinE that my feet. I would spend that day much as I spent the stronE ideas were being recycled and thinned out by next few weeks, looking for kindred souls, shelter, people Ike Andy. and, most urgently, a job. Summer seemed the wrong When I got to know Andy, I got it. I found out that time to find a sympathetic student. Everyone was less it was really something else entirely than his image than eager to provide me with a helping hand. Ev- suggested. This was a very happy, elegant and joyful eryone was struggling, and I, the country mouse, was use of images and I really enjoyed the sense of hu- just an awkward presence. Eventually I went back to mour that was there. It was scatological and hilari- the city and slept in Central Park, not far from the ous. Andy was a very quiet impish figure, a silent, ef- statue of the Mad Hatter. fective manipulator, and as manipulators go, he was Along Fifth Avenue, I left applications at shops and the most benign I’ve ever met. He put disparate ele- bookstores. I would often stop before a grand ho- ments together, which is what I’ve always appreciat- tel, an alien observer to the Proustian lifestyle of the ed him for, because it’s what I try to do with music. I privileged class, exiting sleek black cars with exqui- was watch ing what Andy was doing. Everybody was site brown-and-gold-patterned trunks. It was another playing this humongous tug of war with each other. side of life. Horse-drawn carriages were stationed be- The monologues in Andy’s films capture this style of tween the Paris Theatre and the Plaza Hotel. In dis- conversation. carded newspapers I would search out the evening’s Andy was mischievous and full of games. Lou was a entertainment. Across from the Metropolitan Opera professional at playing games, but Andy’s games were I watched the people enter, sensing their anticipation. more dazzling and original in their style. At times Lou The city was a real city, shifty and sexual. I was

John Cale 101 102 Patti Smith was completely spooked by Andy; he didn’t under- lightly jostled by small herds of flushed young sailors stand what made this man tick. Lou’s was an endless looking for action on Forty Second Street, with its search to find the button. Andy had this element of rows of X-rated movie houses, brassy women, glit- wanting to be a saint in him and he was driven from tering souvenir shops, and hot-dog vendors. I wan- purity like a candle of absolution in life, not later, dered through Kino parlors and peered through the now, to do good works. The value of awkwardness windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant’s Raw also became clear. What I got from Andy was total Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles acceptance of what my action was and how to make of fresh oysters. it work. He was magic. Everything was glowing to The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem me. Andy never showed the black side of despair. The like mere corporate shells. They were monuments Factory never seemed to be anything but a very bub- to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. bly, progressive atmosphere. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and We’d get up at two in the afternoon and go up one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the to Andy Warhol’s Factory. I went with a purpose to emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of work, and I got so much enjoyment out of the ideas the artisan and the architects. bouncing back and forth with Andy that for me it I walked for hours from park to park. In Wash- was great. He was probabt)’ the closest collaborator ington Square one could still feel the characters of that anybody would want to have. For all the ideas Henry James and the presence of the author himself. that Lou and I came up with, as insubordinate as they Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was were to what was artistically viable at the time, Andy greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic gui- was the guy supporting it and tell ing us not to forget tars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leaf- about it. He was definitely a co-conspirator in all of it. leting, older chess players challenged by the young. Andy’s greatest superstar, Edie Sedgwick, se- This open atmosphere was something I had not ex- duced me on my second day at the Factory and I perienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be moved into her apartment on East 63rd Street at oppressive to anyone. Madison Avenue on the ritzy Upper East Sjde. The I was beat and hungry, roaming with a few belong- affair lasted about six weeks, me living with her. Al- ings wrapped in a cloth, hobo style, a sack without a though desperate and on her last legs with Andy, she stick-my suitcase stashed in Brooklyn. It was a Sunday

John Cale 103 104 Patti Smith still possessed all the elemental magic, frayed beauty and I took a day off from searching for work. Through and Presence of Marilyn Monroe. Her family owned the night I had gone back and forth to the end of the the Southern Pacific Railroad. She would regale me line at Coney Island, snatching bits of sleep when I with stories about her family and all the chain beat- could. I got off the F tram at the Washington Square ings of her father and stuff like that. She was really a station and walked down Sixth Avenue. I stopped to beautiful creature to be around. watch the boys shooting hoops near Houston Street. When Edie took an interest in me, I became fas- It was there I met Saint, my guide, a black Chero- cinated by her role in the Factory. I was looking at kee with one foot in the street and the other in the this scene while trying to push my career. Although I Milky Way. He suddenly appeared, as vagabonds will did not want to end up like some of the unfortunate sometimes find one another. people, I was fooling myself, and did end up taking a I swiftly clocked him, inside and out, and per- lot of drugs. Edie was taking large doses of prescribed ceived he was okay. It seemed natural talking with drugs. She was very gragile and was amazing In front him, though I didn’t normally talk to strangers. of the camera, but was also totally lost, not at all in “Hey, sister. What’s your situation?” control of what she was doing. “On earth or in the universe?” The only thing that worried me about being close He laughed and said, “All right!” to her was her dependency. She expected that I would I sized him up while he was looking at the sky. He become her nurse and eventually be brought down had a Jimi Hendrix look, tall, slim, and soft-spoken, by it. I wasn’t about to get involved. though a bit ragged. He posed no threat, uttered no My affair with Edie went on and off for six to sexual innuendos, no mention of the physical plane, eight weeks. She was on heavy medication, about two except the most basic. months. She was with Chuck Wein, a boyfriend from “You hungry?” before her Warhol superstardom. They were making “Yes.” the movie Ciao! Manhattan. That was a really disturb- “Come on.” ing scene, because Bridget Polk was in the film and The street of cafes was just waking up. He stopped she talked about shooting up quite openly. When I’d at physical places on MacDougal Street. He greeted run into Edie later she would be saying that they had the fellows setting up for the new day. “Hey, Saint,” messed with her while she was asleep. She claimed they would say, and he’d shoot the shit while I stood

John Cale 105 106 Patti Smith they had injected her with drugs. And Andy was us- a few feet away. “Got anything for me?” he asked. ing Edie to be introduced to Central Park West, to The cooks knew him well and gave him offerings the Sculls (a wealthy couple who collected modern in brown paper bags. He returned the favor with an- art) and everybody else. She had an account at the ecdotes of his travels from the heartland to Venus. We GinEer Man and took everybody there every niEht. walked to the park, sat on a bench, and divided his Everybody ate and ordered dessert which no one ate take: loaves of day-old bread and a head of lettuce. until Edie ate all the desserts. That went on for a year He had me remove the top layers of the lettuce as he and a half. ‘That’s enough patronaEe for now, I’ll see broke the bread in half. Some of the lettuce was still you later. I’ll go over and fuck Bob Dylan because crisp inside. I’ve heard a bum rap about him and he seems like a “There’s water in the lettuce leaves,” he said. “The nice guy and I’ll go and find out’ - in the meantime bread will satisfy your hunger.” taking handfuls of Miltown tranquillizers and drink- We piled the best leaves on the bread and happi- ing a lot. ly ate. As soon as I went off with Edie, Lou immediate- “A real prison breakfast,” I said. ly fell head over heels in love with Nico and moved “Yeah, but we are free.” in with her. DurinE that period he wrote three ex- And that summed it up. He slept for a while in quisite sonES for her, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, ‘All To- the grass and I just sat quietly with no fear. When he morrow’s Parties’ and ‘Femme Fatale’. Nice was six awoke, we searched around until he found a patch of foot tall, she had a lesbian background and a strong earth without grass. He got a stick and drew a celes- sense of timlng. She was this ice-blonde dominating tial map. He gave me some lessons on man’s place in policewoman. Lou would slowly evaporate out of the universe, then the inner universe. the Factory and into her orbit and I thought it was “You follow this?” somewhat exciting. “It’s normal stuff,” I said. Being with Warhol was the best childhood you can He laughed for a long time. have. From the barren wastes of Wales, I now found Our unspoken routine filled my next few days. At myself in a place where I could talk about music or night we’d go our separate ways. I would watch him art or opera or whatever. MeetinE Andy also chanEed stroll away. He would often be barefoot, his sandals the balance between me and Lou: we drifted apart as slung over his shoulder. I marveled how anyone, even

John Cale 107 108 Patti Smith we moved towards Andy and his world. Billy, Ondine, in summer, would have the courage and stealth to Andy and Lou found a way of EettinE doctors to roam barefoot in the city. write prescriptions for their speed and tranquillizers. We would go find our own sleep outposts. We never At first, before they got to know him, everybody spoke about where we slept. In the morning I would at the Factory adored Lou. In many ways it was the find him in the park and we’d make the rounds, “get- best home he ever had, the first institution where ting vitals,” as he said. We’d eat pita bread and celery he was understood, welcomed, encouraEed and re- stalks. On the third day I found two quarters embed- warded for beinE a twisted, scary monster. Lou, for ded in the grass in the park. We had coffee, toast and his part, Eave them what they wanted, paradinE his jam, and split an egg at the Waverly Diner. Fifty cents whole catalogue of queeny, limp-wristed poses and was real money in 1967. ambitions. Lou took to the Factory water like the That afternoon, he gave me a long recap of man proverbial duck. I was a little less enthusiastic about and the universe. He seemed content with me as a the heavy gay scene that dominated the Factory, and pupil, though he was more distracted than usual. Ve- the hierarchy by which the inhabitants appeared to nus, he had told me, was more than a star. “I’m wait- live or die. I never felt marEinalized. To me, it was just ing to go home,” he said. a marvellous collaboration, where everybody had an It was a beautiful day and we sat in the grass. I guess enormous amount of freedom. Lou felt marEinalized, I dozed off. He wasn’t there when I awoke. There was though. He has this thinE in his persona about hav- a piece of red chalk he used for drawing on the side- ing to struggle alone, not as part of a Eroup. At the walk. I pocketed it and went my way. The next day I time he clearly felt that he was experiencing a lot of half-waited for him to return. But he didn’t. He had boundaries working with other people. It’s something given me just what I needed to keep going. that was there for the duration of our time with Andy. I wasn’t sad, because every time I thought of him He never really resolved in his mind the relationship I’d smile. I imagined him jumping on a boxcar on between Andy and the band, and himself and War- a celestial course to the planet he embraced, appro- hol’s multimedia group the gxploding Plastic Inevi- priately named for the goddess of love. I wondered table, as it would come to be called. why he devoted so much time to me. I reasoned it In some ways, if you’re a protest writer, as Lou is, was because we were both wearing long coats in Ju- then you need some spark of injustice to continue ly, the brotherhood of La Boheme.

John Cale 109 110 Patti Smith - and where ones does not exist, you find one. That I grew more desperate to find a job and started makes you awfully close to being a malcontent. I think a second-level search in boutiques and department that’s always been Lou’s modus operandi, he’s always stores. I was quick to comprehend I wasn’t dressed tried to find something he can work off. Andy was right for this line of work. Even C apezt.o ‘ s, a store never less than considerate to us. Lou couldn’t ful- for classic dance attire, wouldn’t take me, though I ly understand this, he couldn’t grasp this amity that had cultivated a good beatnik ballet look. I canvassed Andy had. ·Even worse, Lou would say something Sixtieth and Lexington and as a last resort left an ap- bitchy, but Andy would say something even bitchier plication at Alexander’s, knowing I would ~ever re- and nicer. This would irritate Lou. ally work there. Then I began to walk downtown, Andy and Nico liked each other’s company. There absorbed m my own condition. was something complicit in the way they both han- It was Friday, July 21, and unexpectedly I collided dled Lou, for instance. Lou was straight-up Jewish with the sorrow of an age. John Coltrane, the man New York, while Nico and Andy were kind of Euro- who gave us A Love Supreme, had died. Scores of pean. Lou was full of himself and faggy in those days. people were gathering across from St. Peter’s Church We called him Lulu, I was Black Jack, Nico was Nico. to say goodbye. Hours passed. People were sobbing as He wanted to be queen bitch and spit out the sharp- the love cry of Albert Ayler spirited the atmosphere. est rebukes of anyone around. Lou always ran with It was if a saint had died, one who had offered up the pack and the Factory was full of queens to run healing music yet was not permitted to heal himself. with. But Lou was dazzled by Andy and Nico. They Along with many strangers, I experienced a deep caught him time and again. She would say things so sense of loss for a man I had not known save through he couldn’t answer back. his music. Lou’s affair with Nico lasted through January and Later I walked down Second Avenue, Frank O’Ha- halfway through February. By then she was finished ra territory. Pink light washed over rows of boarded with him. Nico just swatted him like a fly. When it buildings. New York light, the light of the abstract fell apart, we really learned how Nico could be the expressionists. I thought Frank would have loved the mistress of the destructive one-liner. One morning color of the fading day. Had he lived, he might have we had gathered at the Factory for a rehearsal. Nico written an elegy for John Coltrane like he did for came in late, as usual. Lou said ‘Hello’ to her in a rath- Billie Holiday.

John Cale 111 112 Patti Smith er cold way, but just ‘Hello.’ She simply stood there. I spent the evening checking out the action on St. You could see she was waiting to reply in her own Mark’s Place. Long-haired boys scatting around in time. Ages later, out of the blue, came her first words: striped bell-bottoms and used military jackets flanked ‘I cannot make love to Jews any more.’ with girls wrapped in tie-dye. There were flyers pa- It took a lot to calm Lou down after that. I think pering the streets announcing the coming of Paul he went to the doctor at noon and got a full bottle of Butterfield and Country Joe and the Fish. “White Placidyl, a full bottle of codeine and by nine o’clock Rabbit” was blaring from the open doors of the Elec- that night was completely paralytic. He couldn’t tric Circus. The air was heavy with unstable chemi- move. Everybody saw that and somebody took it cals, mold, and the earthy stench of hashish. The fat upon themselves to relieve him of the bottles, but it of candles burned, great tears of wax spilling onto was only for his own good. the sidewalk. Edie was gone too. She disappeared into the Dylan I can’t say I fit in, but I felt safe. No one noticed entourage like a strip of sunlight peeling off the pave- me. I could move freely. There was a roving commu- ment. Her departure from the Factory was traumat- nity of young people, sleeping in the parks, in make- ic, but not for me. I enjoyed my time with her but I shift tents, the new immigrants invading the East Vil- could see that there was nothing I could do to stop lage. I wasn’t kin to these people, but because of the or help her. Dylan’s entourage was the polar oppo- free-floating atmosphere, I could roam within it. I had site of Andy’s. Leaving him for Bob was about the faith. I sensed no danger in the city, and I never en- most painful and humiliating thing Edie could have countered any. I had nothing to offer a thief and didn’t done to Andy. fear men on the prowl. I wasn’t of interest to anyone, Andy had high aims and big plans for the Velvet and that worked in my favor for the first few weeks of Underground, but first he had to whip his act into July when I bummed around, free to explore by day, shape and bring the focus and volume to a shatter- sleeping where I could at night. I sought door wells, ing level. To this end he arranged a week-long en- subway cars, even a graveyard. Startled to awake be- gagement in mid-February at the Cinematheque, neath the city sky or being shaken by a strange hand. where underground movies were screened. We were Time to move along. Time to move along. in this tiny little theatre, playing as loud as possible, When it got really rough, I would go back to Pratt, just victimizing the audience more than anything. occasionally bumping into someone I knew who

John Cale 113 114 Patti Smith There was a barrage of films on the screen, four or would let me shower and sleep a night. Or else I five films coming on at the same time, colour, black would sleep in the hall near a familiar door. That and white; spotlights, strobes and all that deafening wasn’t much fun, but I had my mantra, “I’m free, I’m music. Well, the Cinematheque got a lot of publici- free.” Although after several days, my other mantra, ty anyway, and it got to the point where the public- “I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” seemed to be in the fore- ity gave us enough time to get money to put a show front. I wasn’t worried, though. I just needed a break together. Under the title Andy Warhol Uptight, we and I wasn’t going to give up. I dragged my plaid developed the multimedia show. suitcase from stoop to stoop, trying not to wear out In March Andy took us on a bus to a couple of col- my unwelcome. leges: Rutgers in New Jersey and the University of It was the summer Coltrane died. The summer of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, he was looking “Crystal Ship.” Flower children raised their empty for a venue in New york where he could put us on arms and China exploded the H-bomb. Jimi Hendrix for an uninterrupted month. He was sure this would set his guitar in flames in Monterey AM radio played deliver the decsive knockout and put us over the top. “Ode to Billie Joe.” There were riots in Newark Mil- waukee ‘ ‘ and Detroit. It was the summer of Elvira Madigan, the summer of love. And in this shifting, in- hospitable atmosphere, a chance encounter changed the course of my life. It was the summer I met . It was hot in the city, but I still wore my raincoat. It gave me confidence as I hit the streets looking for work, my only resume a stint in a factory, ves- tiges of an incomplete education, and an immacu- lately starched waitress uniform. I landed a job in a little Italian restaurant called Joe’s on Times Square. Three hours into my first shift, after spilling a tray of veal Parmigiana on a customer’s tweed suit, I was re- lieved of my duties. Knowing I would never make it

John Cale 115 116 Patti Smith as a waitress, I left my uniform-only slightly soiled- with the matching wedgies in a public bathroom. My mother had given them to me, a white uniform with white shoes, investing in them her own hopes for my well-being. Now they were like wilted lilies, left in a white sink. Negotiating the thick psychedelic atmosphere of St. Mark’s Place, I was not prepared for the revolution under way. There was an air of vague and unsettling paranoia, an undercurrent of rumors, snatched frag- ments of conversation anticipating future revolution. I just sat there trying to figure it all out, the air thick with pot smoke, which may account for my dreamy recollections. I clawed through a thick web of the culture’s consciousness that I hadn’t known existed. I had lived in the world of my books, most of them written in the nineteenth century. Though I was prepared to sleep on benches, in subways and grave- yards, until I got work, I was not ready for the con- stant hunger that gnawed at me. I was a skinny thing with a high metabolism and a strong appetite. Ro- manticism could not quench my need for food. Even Baudelaire had to eat. His letters contained many a desperate cry for want of meat and porter. I needed a job. I was relieved when I was hired as a cashier m the uptown branch of Brentano’s bookstore. I would have preferred manning the poetry section over ringing up sales of ethnic jewelry and crafts, but

Chantal Akerman 118 Patti Smith I liked looking at trinkets from far-away countries: Berber bracelets, shell collars from Afghanistan, and a jewel encrusted Buddha. My favorite object was a modest necklace from Persia. It was made of two enameled metal plaques bound together with heavy black and silver threads, like a very old and exotic scapular. It cost eighteen dollars, which seemed like a lot of money. When things were quiet I would take it out of the case and trace the calligraphy etched up- on its violet surface, and dream up tales of its origins. Shortly after I started working there, the boy I had briefly met m Brooklyn came into the store. He looked quite different in his white shirt and tie, like a Catholic schoolboy. He explained that he worked at Brentano’s downtown branch and had a credit slip he wanted to use. He spent a long time looking at everything, the beads, the small figurines, the tur- quoise rings. Finally he said, “I want this.” It was the Persian necklace. “Oh, it’s my favorite too,” I answered. “It reminds me of a scapular.” “Are you a Catholic?” he asked me. “No, I just like Catholic things.” “I was an altar boy.” He grinned at me. “I loved to swing the frankincense censer.” I was happy because he had selected the piece I sin- gled out, yet sad to see it go. When I wrapped it and

120 Patti Smith handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.” After he left I looked at the empty place where it had lain on a piece of black velvet. By the next morn- ing a more elaborate piece had taken its place, but it lacked the simple mystery of the Persian necklace. By the end of my first week I was very hungry and still had nowhere to go. I took to sleeping in the store. I would hide in the bathroom while the others left, and after the night watchman locked up I would sleep on my coat. In the morning it would appear I had gotten to work early. I hadn’t a dime and rum- maged through employees’ pockets for change to buy peanut butter crackers in the vending machine. De- moralized by hunger, I was shocked when there was no envelope for me on payday. I had not understood that the first week’s pay was withheld, and I went back to the cloakroom in tears. When I returned to my counter, I noticed a guy lurking around, watching me. He had a beard and was wearing a pinstripe shirt and one of those jack- ets with suede patches on the elbows. The supervisor introduced us. He was a science-fiction writer and he wanted to take me out to dinner. Even though I was twenty, my mother’s warning not to go anywhere with a stranger reverberated in my consciousness. But

1972 Chantal Akerman 122 Patti Smith the prospect of dinner weakened me, and I accept- ed. I hoped the guy, being a writer, would be okay, though he seemed more like an actor playing a writer. We walked down to a restaurant at the base of the Empire State Building. I had never eaten at a nice place in New York City. I tried to order something that wasn’t too expensive and chose swordfish, $5.95, the cheapest thing on the menu. I can still see the waiter setting the plate before me with a big wad of mashed potatoes and a slab of overdone swordfish. Even though I was starving, I could hardly enjoy it. I felt uncomfortable and had no idea how to handle the situation, or why he wanted to eat with me. It seemed like he was spending a lot of money on me and I got to worrying what he would expect in return. After the meal we walked all the way downtown. We went east to Tompkins Square Park and sat on a bench. I was conjuring lines of escape when he sug- gested we go up to his apartment for a drink. This was it, I thought, the pivotal moment my mother had warned me about. I was looking around des- perately, unable to answer him, when I saw a young man approaching. It was as if a small portal of future opened, and out stepped the boy from Brooklyn who had chosen the Persian necklace, like an answer to a teenage prayer. I immediately recognized his slightly bowlegged gait and his tousled curls. He was dressed in dungarees and a sheepskin vest. Around his neck

Chantal Akerman 123 124 Patti Smith hung strands of beaded necklaces, a hippie shepherd boy. I ran up to him and grabbed his arm. “Hello, do you remember me?” “Of course,” he smiled. “I need help.” I blurted, “Will you pretend you’re my boyfriend?” “Sure,” he said, as if he wasn’t surprised by my sud- den appearance. I dragged him over to the science-fiction guy. “This is my boyfriend,” I said breathlessly. “He’s been look- ing for me. He’s really mad. He wants me to come home now.” The guy looked at us both quizzically. “Run,” I cried, and the boy grabbed my hand and we took off, through the park across to the other side. Out of breath, we collapsed on someone ‘s stoop. “Thank you, you saved my life,” I said. He accepted this news with a bemused expression. “I never told you my name, it’s Patti.” “My name is Bob.” “Bob,” I said, really looking at him for the first time. “Somehow you don’t seem like a Bob to me. Is it okay if I call you Robert?” The sun had set over Avenue B. He took my hand and we wandered the East Village. He bought me an egg cream at , on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue. I did most of the talking. He just smiled and listened. I told him childhood sto- ries, the first of many: of Stephanie, the Patch, and the

Chantal Akerman 125 126 Patti Smith square-dance hall across the road. I was surprised at how comfortable and open I felt with him. He told me later that he was tripping on acid. I had only read about LSD in a small book called Collages by Anais Nin. I wasn’t aware of the drug cul- ture that was blooming in the summer of ‘67. I had a romantic view of drugs and considered them sacred, reserved for poets, jazz musicians, and Indian rituals. Robert didn’t seem altered or strange in any way I might have imagined. He radiated a charm that was sweet and mischievous, shy and protective. We walked around until two in the morning and finally, almost simultaneously, revealed that neither one of us had a place to go. We laughed about that. But it was late and we were both tired. “I think I know somewhere we can stay,” he said. His last roommate was out of town. “I know where he hides his key; I don’t think he would mind.” We got the subway out to Brooklyn. His friend lived in a little place on Waverly, near the Pratt cam- pus. We went through an alleyway where he found the key hidden beneath a loose brick, and let our- selves into the apartment. We both fell shy when we entered, not so much because we were alone together as that it was some- one else’s place. Robert busied himself making me comfortable and then, in spite of the late hour, asked if I would like to see his work that was stored in a

Chantal Akerman 127 128 Patti Smith back room. Robert spread it out over the floor for me to see. There were drawings, etchings, and he unrolled some paintings that reminded me of Richard Pous- sette-Dart and Henri Michaux. Multifarious ener- gies radiated through interweaving words and cal- ligraphic line. Energy fields built with layers of word. Paintings and drawings that seemed to emerge from the subconscious. There were a set of discs intertwining the words EGO LOVE GOD, merging them with his own name; they seemed to recede and expand over his flat surfaces. As I stared at them, I was compelled to tell him of my nights as a child seeing circular pat- terns radiating on the ceiling. He opened a book on Tantric art. “Like this?” he asked. “Yes.” I recognized with amazement the celestial circles of my childhood. A mandala. I was particularly moved by the drawing he had do- ne on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc’s feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue. I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me without hesita- tion and I understood that in this small space of time

Chantal Akerman 129 130 Patti Smith we had mutually surrendered our loneliness and re- placed it with trust. We looked at books on Dada and Surrealism and ended the night immersed in the slaves of Michel- angelo. Wordlessly we absorbed the thoughts of one another and just as dawn broke fell asleep in each other’s arms. When we awoke he greeted me with his crooked smile, and I knew he was my knight. As if it was the most natural thing in the world we stayed together, not leaving each other’s side save to go to work. Nothing was spoken; it was just mutu- ally understood. For the following weeks we relied on the generosi- ty of Robert’s friends for shelter, notably Patrick and Margaret Kennedy, in whose apartment on Waver- ly Avenue we had spent our first night. Ours was an attic room with a mattress, Robert’s drawings tacked on the wall and his paintings rolled in a corner and I with only my plaid suitcase. I’m certain it was no small burden for this couple to harbor us, for we had meager resources, and I was awkward socially. In the evenings we were lucky to share the Kennedys’ ta- ble. We pooled our money, every cent going toward our own place. I worked long hours at Brentano’s and skipped lunches. I befriended another employee, named Frances Finley. She was delightfully eccentric and discreet. Discerning my plight, she would leave me Tupperware containers of homemade soup on the

Chantal Akerman 131 132 Patti Smith table of the employee cloakroom. This small gesture fortified me and sealed a lasting friendship. Perhaps it was the relief of having a safe haven at last, for I seemed to crash, exhausted and emotionally overwrought. Though I never questioned my deci- sion to give my child up for adoption, I learned that to give life and walk away was not so easy. I became for a time moody and despondent. I cried so much that Robert affectionately called me Soakie. Robert was infinitely patient with my seemingly inexplicable melancholy. I had a loving family and could have returned home. They would have un- derstood, but I didn’t want to go back with my head bowed. They had their own struggles and I now had a companion I could rely on. I had told Robert every- thing about my experience, though there was no pos- sible way of hiding it. I was so small-hipped that car- rying a child had literally opened the skin of my belly. Our first intimacy revealed the fresh red scars criss- crossing my abdomen. Slowly, through his support, I was able to conquer my deep self-consciousness. When we had finally saved enough money, Robert looked for a place for us to live. He found an apart- ment in a three-story brick building on a tree-lined street around the corner from the Myrtle el and with- in walking distance of Pratt. We had the entire sec- ond floor, with windows facing east and west, but its aggressively seedy condition was out of my range of

Chantal Akerman 133 134 Patti Smith experience. The walls were smeared with blood and psychotic scribbling, the oven crammed with dis- carded syringes, and the refrigerator overrun with mold. Robert cut a deal with the landlord, agreeing to clean and paint it himself provided we pay only one month’s deposit, instead of the required two. The rent was eighty dollars a month. We paid one hun- dred and sixty dollars to move into 160 Hall Street. We regarded the symmetry as favorable. Ours was a small street with low ivy-covered brick garages converted from former stables. It was just a short walk to the diner, the phone booth, and Jake’s art supply store, where St. James Place began. The staircase up to our floor was dark and narrow, with an arched niche carved into the wall, but our door opened onto a small, sunny kitchen. From the windows above the sink you could see a huge white mulberry tree. The bedroom faced the front with or- nate medallions on the ceiling that boasted the orig- inal turn-of-the-century plasterwork. Robert had assured me he would make it a good home and, true to his word, he labored to make it ours. The first thing he did was to wash and scrub the crusted stove with steel wool. He waxed the floors cleaned the windows, and whitewashed the walls. Our few possessions were heaped in the center of our future bedroom. We slept on our coats. On trash night we scavenged the streets and magically found

Chantal Akerman 135 136 Patti Smith all we needed. A discarded mattress in the lamplight, a small bookcase, repairable lamps, earthenware bowls, images of Jesus and the in ornate crumbling frames, and a threadbare Persian rug for my corner of our world. I scrubbed the mattress with baking soda. Robert rewired the lamps, adding vellum shades tattooed with his own designs. He was good with his hands, still the boy who had made jewelry for his mother. He worked for some days restringing a beaded cur- tain, and hung it at the entrance of our bedroom. At first I was a little skeptical about the curtain. I had never seen such a thing but it eventually harmonized with my own gypsy elements. I went back to South Jersey and retrieved my books and clothing. While I was gone Robert hung his drawings and draped the walls with Indian cloth. He dressed the mantel with religious artifacts, candles, and souvenirs from the Day of the Dead, arranging them as if sacred objects on an altar. Finally he pre- pared a study area for me with a little worktable and the frayed magic carpet. We combined our belongings. My few records were filed in the orange crate with his. My winter coat hung next to his sheepskin vest. My brother gave us a new needle for our record player, and my mother made us meatball sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. We ate them and happily listened

Chantal Akerman 137 138 Patti Smith to Tim Hardin, his songs becoming our songs, the expression of our young love. My mother also sent along a parcel of sheets and pillowcases. They were soft and familiar, possessing the sheen of years of wear. They reminded me of her as she stood in the yard assessing with satisfaction the wash on the line as it fluttered in the sun. My treasured objects were mingled with the laun- dry. My work area was a jumble of manuscript pages, musty classics, broken toys, and talismans. I tacked pictures of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Lotte Lenya, Piaf, Genet, and John Lennon over a makeshift desk where I arranged my quills, my inkwell, and my note- books-my monastic mess. When I came to New York I had brought a few colored pencils and a wood slate to draw on. I had drawn a girl at a table before a spread of cards, a girl divining her fate. It was the only drawing I had to show Robert, which he liked very much. He wanted me to experience working with fine paper and pen- cils, and shared his materials with me. We would work side by side for hours, in a state of mutual concen- tration. We hadn’t much money but we were happy. Robert worked part-time and took care of the apartment. I did the laundry and made our meals, which were very limited. There was an Italian bak- ery we frequented, off Waverly. We would choose a nice loaf of day-old bread or a quarter pound of

Chantal Akerman 139 140 Patti Smith their stale cookies offered at half-price. Robert had a sweet tooth, so the cookies often won out. Some- times the woman behind the counter would give us extra and fill the small brown paper sack to the brim with yellow and brown pinwheels, shaking her head and murmuring friendly disapproval. Most likely she could tell it was our dinner. We would add take-out coffee and a carton of milk. Robert loved chocolate milk but it was more expensive and we would delib- erate whether to spend the extra dime. We had our work and one other. We didn’t have the money to go to concerts or movies or to buy new re- cords, but we played the ones we had over and over. We listened to my Madame Butterfly as sung by El- eanor Steber. A LoYe Supreme. Between the Buttons. Joan Baez and Blonde on Blonde. Robert introduced me to his favorites Vanilla Fudge, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin-and his History of Motown provided the backdrop for our nights of communal joy. One Indian summer day we dressed in our favorite things, me in my beatnik sandals and ragged scarves, and Robert with his love beads and sheepskin vest. We took the subway to West Fourth Street and spent the afternoon in Washington Square. We shared coffee from a thermos, watching the stream of tourists, ston- ers, and folksingers. Agitated revolutionaries distrib- uted antiwar leaflets. Chess players drew a crowd of their own. Everyone coexisted within the continuous

Chantal Akerman 141 142 Patti Smith drone of verbal diatribes, bongos, and barking dogs. We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her be- mused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”

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