POPism (28 page)

Susan Pile, who was working at the Factory now, would come over to the Dom and baby-sit for Ari, Nico's four-year-old son, during the first set, and then take him over to Paul's apartment a couple of blocks away on 10th Street and Second Avenue.
She'd practice her French on him. He was such a beautiful little kid, and he'd say the strangest things, like “I want to throw hot snowballs.”

Downtown at the big Village Theater, which would later become the Fillmore East, Dr. Tim Leary was doing shows that September—they were called Celebrations—for the League for Spiritual Discovery—LSD. The idea was to give people a preview, through a mixed-media show, of what an ideal LSD trip was like. Leary always had people on the bill with him like LeRoi Jones and Mark Lane and Allen Ginsberg. Everything about these shows was so sweet and naive—they told you you should plan your LSD trips as carefully as you'd plan your itinerary for an actual vacation, like have specific records to play and paintings to look at while you tripped—otherwise, Tim said, it would be like “drug abuse.” Paul was laughing through the whole show, saying, “God, Doctor Leary is wonderful! What a medicine show!”

Tim was up there, this charming, handsome Irishman, informing his audience, “God doesn't think in words, you see—He thinks in visual images like”—and then he would gesture behind him to where all these abstract slides were suddenly projected over the stage—
“these!”

Paul got excited. “Look!” he said. “He's doing a complete copy of our Exploding Plastic Inevitable show! Oh, he really
is
wonderful. But you know, this is all for the good, because now that drugs have gotten this commercialized, they're bound to go right out. I guarantee you that in three months drugs will be finished completely—look what a joke they are already.” (In the drugged-up years that followed, Paul would admit many times, “That prediction was my most enormous miscalculation.”)

Listening to Tim Leary give his Celebrations that fall was like taking an Acid for Beginners course. By the time the next summer came, if you stood on the corner of 6th Street and Second Avenue, about every other kid who passed by would be tripping on LSD, and 90 percent of the rest would be high on some other kind of drug.

Chelsea Girls
was the movie that made everyone sit up and notice what we were doing in films (and a lot of times that meant sit up, stand up, and walk out). Until then the general attitude toward what we did was that it was “artistic” or “camp” or “a put-on” or just plain “boring.” But after
Chelsea Girls
, words like
degenerate
and
disturbing
and
homosexual
and
druggy
and
nude
and
real
started being applied to us regularly.

(People reacted very strongly to that movie. A very nice older woman came up to me at a party at the UN once, and after we'd small-talked a little bit, she said how much she wanted to see
Chelsea Girls
. I told her that it didn't play around much anymore but that we could show her some of our newer movies that were easier to get hold of for a screening. She said no, she only wanted to see
Chelsea Girls
, because her daughter had jumped in front of a train right after seeing it. I didn't know what to say to her.)

We opened it at the Film-Makers' Cinemathèque on 41st Street. It was eight hours of film, but since we were projecting two reels side by side on a split screen, it only took about half that time. Parts of it were in color, but it was mostly black and white.

We got our usual sympathetic reviews from the underground writers. But then Jack Kroll wrote a long, fascinating review of it in
Newsweek
that made so many people want to see it that we had to move to a bigger theater, the Cinema Rendezvous
on West 57th Street. Then Bosley Crowther wrote a silly review (it was a reprimand, really) of it for
The New York Times:
“It has come time to wag a warning finger at Andy Warhol and his underground friends and tell them, politely but firmly, that they are pushing a reckless thing too far. It was all right as long as [they] stayed in Greenwich Village or on the south side of 42nd Street…. But now that their underground has surfaced on West 57th Street and taken over a theater with carpets… it is time for permissive adults to stop winking at their too-precocious pranks…”

If anybody wants to know what those summer days of '66 were like in New York with us, all I can say is go see
Chelsea Girls
. I've never seen it without feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was right back there all over again. It may have looked like a horror show—“cubicles in hell”—to some outside people, but to us it was more like a comfort—after all, we were a group of people who understood each other's problems.

In September we started going regularly to a two-story bar/restaurant on Park Avenue South off Union Square that Mickey Ruskin had opened in late '65. It was called Max's Kansas City and it became the ultimate hangout. Max's was the farthest uptown of any of the restaurants Mickey had ever operated. He'd had a place on East 7th Street called Deux Mégots that later became the Paradox, and then he'd had the Ninth Circle, a Village bar with a format similar to what Max's would have, and then an Avenue B bar called the Annex. Mickey had always been attracted to the downtown art atmosphere—at Deux Mégots, he'd held poetry readings—and now painters and poets were starting to drift into Max's. The art heavies would group around the bar and the kids would be in the back room, basically.

Max's Kansas City was the exact place where Pop Art and pop life came together in New York in the sixties—teeny boppers and sculptors, rock stars and poets from St. Mark's Place, Hollywood actors checking out what the underground actors were all about, boutique owners and models, modern dancers and go-go dancers—everybody went to Max's and everything got homogenized there.

Larry Rivers once said to me, “I've often asked myself, ‘What is a bar?' It's a space that has liquor that's usually fairly dark, where you go for a certain kind of social interaction. It's not a dinner party. It's not a dance. It's not an opening. You move in a certain way through this space, over a period of time, and you begin to recognize faces that begin to recognize you. And you may have had experiences with some of these people before which you kind of pick up on in another way in this space.”

One night I happened to be at Max's when Larry came in. That afternoon Frank O'Hara had been buried in Springs, Long Island, with Jackson Pollock's grave in the distance, and half the art world had gone out there for the funeral. Larry came over to my table holding a drink and sat down. He looked terrible. He'd been really close friends with Frank. After he was hit by a car, they took him to the nearest hospital, Larry told me, where they didn't realize he was bleeding internally until the next morning, and by then he'd been losing blood for eight hours. Frank's best friends, Larry and Kenneth Koch and Joe LeSueur and Bill de Kooning, were all called to the hospital, and de Kooning and Larry went up to his room to see him. “He thought he was at a cocktail party,” Larry said. “It was a dream conversation. And three hours later he was dead. I made this speech at the funeral today—I was practically in tears. I just thought I'd describe what
Frank looked like that afternoon, the marks on his body, the stitches, the tubes coming out of him. But I didn't get to finish because everyone was screaming at me to shut up….” Larry shook his head. It sounded like a very Pop eulogy to me—just the surface things. It was just what I hoped people would do for me if I died. But evidently death wasn't something the people out there in Springs that afternoon wanted to be Pop about.

“It's very selfish of me, I know,” Larry said, “but all I can think is that there'll never be anybody who likes my work as much as Frank did. It's like that poem of Kenneth's—‘He Likes My Work.'”

It was scary to think that you could lose your life if you were taken to the wrong hospital or if you happened to get the wrong doctor at the right hospital. It sounded to me like Frank wouldn't have died if they'd realized in time that he was bleeding.

I'd known Frank, too. He was kind of small, and he always wore tennis shoes, and he talked a little like Truman Capote, and even though he was Irish, he had a face like a Roman senator. He'd say things like “Listen, Circe, just because you've turned us all into pigs, don't think we're going to forget you're still our queen!”

I started going to Max's a lot. Mickey was an art fan, so I'd give him a painting and he'd give us credit, and everybody in our group could just sign for their dinners until the credit was used up. It was a really pleasant arrangement.

The back room at Max's, lit by Dan Flavin's red light piece, was where everybody wound up every night. After all the parties were over and all the bars and all the discotheques closed up, you'd go on to Max's and meet up with everybody—and it was like going home, only better.

Max's became the showcase for all the fashion changes that had been taking place at the art openings and shows: now people weren't going to the art openings to show off their new looks—they just skipped all the preliminaries and went straight to Max's. Fashion wasn't what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going. The event itself was optional—the way Max's functioned as a fashion gallery proved that. Kids would crowd around the security mirror over the night deposit slot in the bank next door (“Last mirror before Max's”) to check themselves out for the long walk from the front door, past the bar, past all the fringe tables in the middle, and finally into the club room in the back.

Max's is where I started meeting the really young kids who had dropped out of school and been running around the streets for a couple of years—hard-looking, beautiful little girls with perfect makeup and fabulous clothes, and you'd find out later they were fifteen and already had a baby. These kids really knew how to dress, they had just the right fashion instincts, somehow. They were a type of kid I hadn't been around much before. Although they weren't educated like the Boston crowd or the San Remo crowd, they were very sharp in a comical sort of way—I mean, they certainly knew how to put each other down, standing on chairs and screaming insults. Like, if Gerard walked in with his fashion look really together and had that very serious Roman god-like expression on his face that people get when they think they're looking good, one of the little girls at Max's (the Twin-Twats, they were called) would jump up on the table and swoon, “Oh my God, it's Apollo! Oh, Apollo, will you sit with us tonight?”

I couldn't decide if these kids were intelligent but crazy, or just plain pea-brained with a flair for comedy and clothes. It was
impossible to tell whether their problem was lack of intelligence or lack of sanity.

Edie Sedgwick and Susan Bottomly had gotten to be good friends, although Susan was about five years younger. They'd met in New York in the late winter of '66—two rich, beautiful girls from old New England families.

One afternoon in October, David Croland stopped by the Factory when we were dishing and I asked him right out what he thought of Edie. He was silent for a few seconds and then started out carefully, “Well, she's very unsure of people when she first meets them….” Then he suddenly started laughing at how phony he sounded. “What am I talking about? She's a
snob
. A
big snob!
One of the first nights I met her, at Arthur, I flashed on her huge earrings—half-moons with stars—and I asked her would she please let Susan borrow them for a couple of hours. She pulled them right off her ears and handed them to me. She said, ‘I will
give
Susan these earrings. But don't
ever
ask me to
lend
anybody anything.'” David smiled, remembering it. “She's a kleptomaniac who gives everything away. She'll never be at your apartment that you won't find something missing after she's left…”

A few days after that conversation with David, the candles that Edie always kept burning in her apartment on East 63rd Street started a fire in the middle of the night, and she was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital with burns on her arms and legs and back.

I'd seen Edie lighting candles once, and from the absent-minded way she went about it, it was clearly a dangerous routine. I told her she shouldn't, but she naturally didn't listen—she always did exactly what she wanted.

• • •

That fall, after working all day at the Factory, we'd usually go out to II Mio and then to Ondine and wind up at Arthur.

A band called the Druids had been playing at Ondine for a couple of months. Jimi Hendrix—this was before he was Jimi Hendrix, he was still Jimmy James—would sit there in the audience with his guitar and ask them if he could play with them and they'd say sure. He had short hair and really beautiful clothes—black pants and white silk shirts. This was before he went to England and came back here as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, way before he played Monterey, before the bandanna and the twangy guitar and all that. But he was already playing with his feet. He was such a nice guy, so soft-spoken. One night he told me that he was from Seattle, Washington, and it seemed like he was homesick when he talked about how beautiful it was there, all the water and the way the air was. It's funny but I remember the song that was playing at Ondine while we talked—“Wild Thing” by the Troggs—the song I'd eventually see Jimi do so fantastically himself in '67 at the Fillmore East in his pirate prince look—a green velvet shirt and hat with a pink Musketeer plume. But the night we talked, he was just simple black and white elegant and there was a very sad look to him somehow.

This fall was the first time I remember black people wearing Afros. Everything had changed—from white student-type kids going down south, doing SNCC things, to all-black groups and all-black meetings and all-black demonstrations. Suddenly there was no place for white people in the black problem—the blacks started telling them to just stay home in front of their checkbooks.