POPism (24 page)

The Velvets were staying in an apartment on 3rd Street in the West Village above a firehouse, across the street from the Gold Bug, near a Carvel place and a drugstore. The apartment belonged to Tom O'Horgan, but Tom had sublet it to Stanley Amos, who was living in the back part (the front and back apartments were joined in the middle by a semisecret doorway), and all of Tom's furniture and fixtures were still in it. In the early days of the Velvet Underground, everybody from the Factory spent a lot of time just hanging around down there, going to Chinatown at two in the morning, then up to the Flick on Second Avenue in the Fifties for ice cream at four, or over to the Brasserie.

Tom's apartment looked just like a stage set. The living room was raised and there were long mirrors on both sides of the door with primitive instruments hanging down them from the ceiling. And there were lots of dried flowers and a big black coffin and a couple of chairs with lions' heads on the arms. The room itself was pretty bare—just a few big pieces of furniture. And then there was the heating system—a fifteen-foot gold dragon built onto the ceiling with flames from the heater shooting out its open mouth.

People on amphetamine didn't really have “apartments,” they had “nests”—usually one or two rooms that held fourteen to forty people, with everyone paranoid that somebody would steal their stash or their only magenta Magic Marker or let the water in the bathtub overflow into the pharmacy downstairs.

John Cale used to sit in the front room for days and days with his electric viola, barely moving. Maureen—Mo—the girl drummer, was somebody I could never figure out: she was very innocent and sweet and shy, so then what was she doing there?

The foyer of Stanley's apartment in the back was dark and had jungle murals of a stuffed parrot and of monkeys eating oranges painted on the walls. The only light came from a big black spider lamp whose tail lit up. Then you walked through another small hall into a library that had a fur rug and a beaded lamp and a brick wall, and into the main room, where there was a wonderful piece of art by Johnny Dodd—a portable wall of sixtyone thousand canceled George Washington postage stamp heads cut out with a nail clipper. (Johnny had put an ad in the
Voice
to get all the stamps.) There were Tiffany lamps all over the place, too, and Art Nouveau Mucha prints in colors like beige and dark green of women with flowing hair, and wind-up Indians beating tom-toms, and lots of tapestries and Persian rugs. It looked like a battle of the set decorators.

There was a houseboy who came in once every few days, and Stanley explained that this boy was a homosexual, a Roman Catholic, and an alcoholic who'd dress up in little sailor suits to go out cruising but first he always had to get drunk, otherwise he felt too guilty. He straightened up Stanley's apartment to make the extra money to get drunk on. It was a good thing Stanley had him, too—after the Glitter Festivals.

Stanley had a bureau drawer that was completely filled with bags of glitter—no clothes or anything, just glitter. (It was where Freddy Herko had stored it for his dance concerts, and after Freddy killed himself, Stanley left it all just the way it was.) He would open the drawer and pass out the bags, and about half the people there would drop acid and shower sparkles in the air
till the whole house was covered in them and Judson dancers would twirl through the room with flowers in their hair and the whole floor would change color because it was the multicolored kind of glitter, and outside the kitchen window people would be swinging in a hammock that was strung up across the dead-end alleyway. Most of the guys stayed calm—except for the usual jokes and hysterical laughing—but Ingrid Superstar would go over to the mirrors, put her hands on her face, and start to freak out, hallucinating over and over again, “I'm so ugly, so ugly,” and everyone would try to cheer her up by taking out their cocks and doing ventriloquism, making them talk to her—
that
always got her laughing—but she would only stay distracted for a few minutes and then they'd have to think up something else—it was like trying to make a little kid stop crying.

The other half of the room would be paranoid on amphetamine, staring at the half that was tripping on the LSD. They were each other's audience.

Lou and Ondine would have furious fights over trading Desoxyn for Obetrols—Desoxyn was twice as expensive and had fifteen milligrams of Methedrine, whereas Obetrols apparently had that much Meth plus something like five milligrams of sulfate. I could never figure out what they were talking about, which one was better.

And Rotten Rita used to come in with his homemade speed that everyone knew was the worst in the world. Periodically he'd try to upgrade his credibility by giving somebody their money back, but then the next day he'd be in there trying to sell them the exact same stuff back again, but telling them that it was a much superior batch so naturally it was more expensive. But as Lou said, “It's part of the natural environment to have Rotten do things like that. That's why he's ‘Rotten.' ” Once, I asked the
Duchess why Rotten was also called the Mayor, and she said, “Because he screws everybody in town.”

The Turtle was the switchboard operator at a modest midtown hotel, but he also dealt drugs on the side. He would trade heroin to somebody for Placidyls and then stand back and watch them shoot up once and go to sleep. Then, while they were passed out, he'd grab the rest back and swear to them when they woke up, “Man, you're crazy. You did up
three times.”

The Duchess would rip off her blouse, pull a bottle of vodka out of her bag, swig it, then give herself a poke of speed in the fanny, right through her jeans, then pull them down to show everybody her abscesses (even the boys were a little shocked at that). She'd shoot up anywhere—waiting in a movie line, if she felt like it.

Richie Berlin would sit writing quietly in a corner in khaki shorts and kneesocks and a little necktie—sort of a birdwatching outfit—and she'd tell anyone who tried to talk to her, “Go back to Europe and leave me alone.”

Stanley didn't care much about music. There were only a few records in the place—an avant-garde jazz thing called “Bells” and some classical Indian music (this was right before the big sitar craze started) and two 45's—“Sally Go Round the Roses” from '63 and a thing called “Do the Ostrich” that Lou had written and recorded after reading in Eugenia Sheppard's fashion column that ostrich feathers were going to be big that season. (Lou had had a job writing for a budget record company that made those “three-for-ninety-nine-cents” records that they sold in bargain stores. As “The Beachnuts” he'd tuned all his guitar strings to the same note and bashed away like crazy screaming, “Do the Ostrich!” till the record people made him stop. But then, later on, when the company was low on products, they listened to it
again and decided why not, that maybe it could be a hit after all. So they pressed it, but people kept returning it to the stores for refunds because it was a defective pressing. There'd always be someone new at Stanley's who didn't know what that record was who'd say, “Oh, what's this?” and put it on.)

Silver George would usually be taking amphetamine, dying part of his hair another color, and lying on his stomach on the bed holding a coat hanger up to a clear light bulb with one hand and holding on to a big plant with the other. He had two pet theories: one, that the Japanese had promoted amphetamine so that they could keep their postwar labor force working around the clock, and, two, that plants needed electricity supplements. His idea was to attract the electricity from the light bulb with the metal hanger and transmit it through his body to the plant. The plant was in a wooden stand; it was so big I always wondered where he'd gotten it from—he probably just walked out of some office building lobby with it, but he said no, he'd just “befriended” it. Whoever walked through the room he'd tell, “Look at it move. Did you see it move? Now
look
, I'm not kidding.” And one time, I have to admit, I did see it twitch.

At two o'clock every morning a six-foot-six blond hospital orderly dressed in his whites walked into Stanley's. He was the only person who actually contributed toward the rent—he'd been an ethnologist in Canada working with Eskimos for the Canadian government, he said, but then they'd transferred him to desk work so he decided to move to New York. Before getting a job at St. Vincent's Hospital in the Village, he'd sold hot dogs in Union Square. He didn't even take drugs; he just sat around chatting very pleasantly with whoever was there, and then around five in the morning he'd go off to sleep. He lived there for about two months and then one day he just didn't come back.

Another sort of permanent person there was a young kid named Ronnie Cutrone who was living in the back part with his girl friend. He was from Brooklyn and he'd been hanging around the Village since he was eleven—“because I loved all the dykes on Sixth Avenue over by 8th Street, they sold me Tuinals—Olga the Terrible, Sonny, Tommy…”

Ronnie told me that he used to go cruising with that clique of lesbians near the Women's House of Detention where the inmates screamed down at their lovers out the windows of that huge Deco building in the triangle where all those streets meet—8th and Sixth Avenue and Christopher and Greenwich—over to Howard Johnson's and Prexy's and on to Pam-Pam's, a luncheonette that was open all night on Sixth Avenue, and go with them to dyke hangouts like the Club 82.

I remembered seeing Ronnie for the first time at a sort of folksy party the year before down around MacDougal Street. I was going out and he was coming in and we'd collided, stepping over Bob Dylan, who happened to be lying on the stairs looking smashed and having a great time, reaching up under the girls' skirts when they walked over him up to the party (some of them liked it and some of them didn't—whatever, he'd just laugh), and Ronnie and I couldn't get past each other so he looked down at Dylan and told him, “I loved that crazy rolling organ, man.”

Ronnie was hard to figure out because he always had a steady girl friend, but then he really adored being around all the amphetamine queens. Admittedly, his girl friends were always very boyish-looking; I guess he just liked that style. “At one point, I really tried to be gay,” he told me, “because everybody I knew was and it looked like fun, but it didn't work out.” He
was an early super-bopper and a great dancer—whatever new dancing club was happening, he'd be there.

A bunch of us would leave the Dom really late and go to the after-hours clubs around the Village—Lou knew them all. At the Tenth of Always (named after the Johnny Mathis song “The Twelfth of Never”) there'd always be one same little blond boy every night who'd get drunk and turn to Lou and demand, “Well,
are
you a homosexual or not?
I
am and
I'm proud of
it.” Then he'd smash his glass on the floor and get asked to leave. And then there was Ernie's: no liquor, no music, no food—just a back room with jars of Vaseline on the table.

We took out a half-page ad in that week's
Voice
that read:

Come Blow Your Mind

the Silver Dream Factory presents the first

ERUPTING PLASTIC INEVITABLE

WITH

Andy Warhol

The Velvet Underground

AND

Nico

We had
My Hustler
playing uptown at the Film-Makers' Coop in the Wurlitzer Building on West 41st Street. And even farther uptown on that Saturday there was my opening of the silver helium-filled pillows at the Castelli Gallery with my yellow and pink cow wallpaper all over. (In the full ad for the Dom
opening, it had spelled out that there would be no show on Saturday night “due to uptown art gallery opening.”)

So now, with one thing and another, we were reaching people in all parts of town, all different types of people: the ones who saw the movies would get curious about the gallery show, and the kids dancing at the Dom would want to see the movies; the groups were getting all mixed up with each other—dance, music, art, fashion, movies. It was fun to see the Museum of Modern Art people next to the teeny-boppers next to the amphetamine queens next to the fashion editors.

We all knew something revolutionary was happening, we just felt it. Things couldn't look this strange and new without some barrier being broken. “It's like the Red Seeeea,” Nico said, standing next to me one night on the Dom balcony that looked out over all the action, “paaaaarting.”

All that month the limousines pulled up outside the Dom. Inside, the Velvets played so loud and crazy I couldn't even begin to guess the decibels, and there were images projected everywhere, one on top of the other. I'd usually watch from the balcony or take my turn at the projectors, slipping different-colored gelatin slides over the lenses and turning movies like
Harlot, The Shoplifter, Couch, Banana, Blow Job, Sleep, Empire, Kiss, Whips, Face, Camp, Eat
Into all different colors. Stephen Shore and Little Joey and a Harvard kid named Danny Williams would take turns operating the spotights while Gerard and Ronnie and Ingrid and Mary Might (Woronov) danced sadomasochistic style with the whips and flashlights and the Velvets played and the differentcolored hypnotic dot patterns swirled and bounced off the walls and the strobes flashed and you could close your eyes and hear cymbals and boots stomping and whips cracking and tambourines sounding like chains rattling.

Ondine and the Duchess would shoot people up in the crowd if they halfway knew them. Once, from the balcony, I saw blood spurt in a strobe flash across Pauline de Rothschild and Cecil Beaton. Later Ondine came running out of the bathroom screaming that he'd dropped his “spike” down the toilet by mistake. Paul yelled, “Good!” and he really meant it—we were afraid they'd jab somebody they didn't know.