New York City in 1962 at the end of the Beat era
The memories of an 85-year-old man who slept on Ginsberg’s couch when the world was young.
William Burroughs videos take me back to that long-defunct Beat scene and to memories of those artists who are either long-dead, dying or alive and no longer in their right minds. They were artists who sometimes really were artists. Others were no more than scam artists.
I remember shooting dope with Bob Kaufman under a building next to a boiler on a frozen winter day. He was a brilliant poet whose mind burned out on meth. He’d scream poetry at moving cars and cover his face with little pieces of band aids in the shape of crosses.
There are memories of Gregory Corso shooting heroin so he could create enough pain and suffering to write about. What an idiot. I did all that myself because it came natural to me. Drugs and booze were beacons in the night whose glow I thought would lead me out of pain and suffering, never into it, which of course makes me an idiot of another stripe.
Remembering, and cringing, about that time Peter Orlovsky came out of his bedroom, arm around the waist of a sweat-drenched, soul-tuggingly beautiful redhead. Just one look at her grabbed me by my collar, drug me up and out of my ever-so-cool distant and unreachable hipster facade and into the full-vista-technicolored world of desire. My heart was beating in surround sound when that fool said, “You must try her… she’s wonderful.”
She, standing there in her sweaty glow, grinning ear to ear, looked stupidly proud for having bedded an icon. Damn her. Damn him. Her insipid smile and his boorish pretensions sent all that freshly-awakened feeling of having been bathed in color, warmth and light scuttling back beneath my flat surface. Another hero, another fantasy, crumbled to dust…
But man, it ain’t nothin. I’m cool. Know what I mean, baby?
Sitting at a cafe on the Lower East Side with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Taylor Mead and Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, where I was drunk and broke. Gala put a five-dollar bill down to pay for her coffee. I took the bill, stuffed it in my mouth and chewed, pretending to swallow, only to spit it out when no one was looking. Class act.
Gala asked me to find her a nice brown-eyed dark-haired Italian boy to accompany her to her husband’s art show uptown. I talked to Tony, the kid who worked at the pizza shop washing dishes. He was young, good-looking and fit her basic description. I found Gala at Ginsburg’s apartment on 10th Street, introduced her to Tony and left.
Tony later told me she wanted to take him to Spain. He said he had no problem “doing the old bat” for a trip to Spain. Once he was packed and ready to go, he asked me to tell his boss what was going on and see if he’d hire me for the dishwashing job. Tony was afraid to tell him he was quitting. I thought washing dishes beat the hell out of pretending to eat someone’s money in order to survive, and took the job.
It was warm inside the Italian restaurant. My meals were free and there was money to rent a room instead of sleeping under buildings or seeking a crash pad that hadn’t banned me.
Taylor Mead would let me into his room when there was no other place for me to go, but I had to pay for my visit in the usual way. He told me to hang my dirty socks outside on the bannister. I never got how his mind worked. He hated dirty socks, but wouldn’t allow me to shower before he did his thing.
One time, when he was writing in his journal, I said, “Hey Taylor, put me in your book.”
The prick wrote, “Gypsy wants to be in my book, so now he is in it.”
Breakfast for Taylor was a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter straight out of the jar, then coffee at a place down the street. From there, off to a Lower East Side theater where he supplied the sound effects and music for silent films. I agreed to go because there would be booze, drugs and a chance to connect with someone who might use me as model, bit actor, dancer or just a cheap trick. It didn’t matter what they wanted me for as long as it kept me in food, cigarettes, drugs and booze.
I modeled for Wynn Chamberlain at his loft at 222 Bowery, and that’s where I met William Burroughs for the first time, along with a hell of a lot more dead and mostly forgotten minds of that generation.
I once strutted down the Village streets leading a mock funeral parade, replete with Ike jacket, grubby jeans, black beret and ragged open-toed sneakers, high-stepping a Beat rendition of a drum major for yet another avant-garde movie that went nowhere beyond a few artsy-fartsy East Side dens, after which it got buried in God alone knows whose archive, never again to see light of day.
The last memory I have of that time is Taylor asking me to go to Italy with him. I was not willing to go to Italy with a man who craved attention and did whatever it took to get it. It was a big thing to turn down. Now it’s another blast from the past and it still gives me chills.
That’s the joy of the internet. I remember a time when I was involved with someone sixty years ago. I look them up to reminisce about how easy it was to float among the rich and famous. I type it up here, click post. There’s nothing my ego can grab on to, because after all I was just another someone in a crowd, in the background, doing a little of this or that, either in the way of helping out or as part of an ongoing, totally insane party.
From my book SO IT GOES AND TO HELL WITH IT, a collaboration with this man about his dirty life and times.