POPism (35 page)

If this was the third time I'd had a conversation with her, the second time had been in '65 when she came by the Factory to ask me for money. She'd done it with all the nonchalance of somebody asking for their paycheck—except that I didn't even know her! What she essentially said was “I need twenty dollars, and you can afford it.” I noticed she had the habit of very elegantly scratching her cunt on the outside of her dress as she talked to you. I gave her the meaningless line you always say when you don't want to give a handout—“I don't have any money.” Now at this Leo party—she was a Leo, too—was the first time since then that I was seeing her, and I asked her what had made her come by that day to panhandle.

“Well,” she said, “Gerard was always asking me to come to the Factory and I always told him no, no, no, but then I saw the prices your paintings were getting so the next time he asked me, I went over with him.”

“But how did you know Gerard?” I asked.

“Oh, just from around the Chelsea. My sister and I had a room there and we were short sixteen dollars for the rent one month and Gerard came in and tried to make me and I said, ‘Get out of here, Gerard—everybody knows you're a big fag!' and he got very upset and started screaming, ‘Where did you hear that? Where did you hear that?' and I told him that everybody said he was your boyfriend and he went crazy—'I am not! I am not!'—so I told him in that case to try my sister, and of course she turned him down, too, so then when I went over to
the Factory with him to see you, you turned me down for the money, so that was that.”

The next day Viva arrived at the apartment where we were filming
Loves of Ondine
(which was originally part of**** but which we eventually released as a separate feature). The first thing she did was open her blouse and show us her breasts: over each nipple she'd pasted a round adhesive bandage, and so we filmed her telling Ondine that if he wanted to see her naked, he'd have to pay for every article of clothing she removed, including the two adhesives.

We all loved Viva; we'd never seen anything like her, and from then on, it was just taken for granted that she'd be in whatever movie we did. She was funny, stylish, and photogenic—and she gave great interviews. She even wrote reviews of our movies for a local publication called
Downtown
, using the by-line of Susan Hoffmann (her real name), giving herself, naturally, total raves: “Viva! is a hilarious combo of Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, and Carole Lombard…. she combines the elegance of the Thirties with the catty candor… of the Sixties….” We took blurbs from Viva's rave reviews of herself and ran them in newspaper ads for our movies. Why not? Everything she said was true.

And if a good way to get around the censors was to confuse them, then Viva was perfect for the times, because when she took her clothes off, there was always the question of whether her bony body was a
turn-on
or
-off
—the “prurience” was really in question there.

When
Chelsea Girls
opened at the Presidio Theater in L.A. in late August
'67
, Paul, Ultra, Ondine, Billy, and I flew to California for personal appearances. Nico was already out there; she'd
been at the Castle all summer with Jim Morrison, but she'd gone off with Brian Jones to the Monterey Festival. (Edie stayed at the Castle a little while that summer, too. She had come cross-country in a Volkswagen station wagon—someone else drove— after being very out of it, taking lots of drugs those last days in New York.)

We were sort of in two groups. Ondine, Billy, and a girl they called Orion the Witch of Bleecker Street—an A-head friend of theirs from New York who'd just moved out to San Francisco— formed one group. They went around terrorizing the flower people and saying every minute how they couldn't stand the West Coast another second. I walked into their rooms once when they had all just taken belladonna, and I watched a friend of Ondine's, naked except for polka-dot socks, drop a marble tabletop on his foot and not feel it. Ondine said, “There
is
no hallucinogen other than belladonna. It is a visual poison.” I'd heard that from a few people—that acid was nothing compared to belladonna.

The rest of us just went wandering around the city, getting the feel of the place at the end of the big Love Summer. There were bad vibrations from the San Francisco hippies toward anything that was above a sort of psychedelic poverty level—anything that looked like it cost money was part of the Establishment— and so when we drove around town for a day or two in a Cadillac limousine that the movie theater rented for us, it was like we were waving a red flag; the flower children in the street would turn and glare at us, very contemptuous. That didn't bother us; we thought it was funny, and Paul, of course, was having a ball—he even figured out a way to antagonize the Haight Ash-bury types a little more: he'd have our driver pull over beside
groups of kids in beads and flowers, then he'd roll down the limousine window and ask them, “Say, where's the nearest Salvation Army? We want to buy ourselves some hippie clothes.”

As we drove through the different sections of town, we were all talking about the Black Panthers. (In between “Negro” and “black,” the term “Afro-American” had come up, but it had never caught on the way “black” had—it was like trying to make people call Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas.”) The Black Panthers got a lot of attention walking around San Francisco with their guns showing, and nobody could stop them because evidently it wasn't against the law to carry guns openly, just to conceal them. But since nobody much had ever really taken advantage of the technicality before, the sight of those guns was a shocker, especially in the flower-power make-love-not-war city.

It had been a whole year since we were out there at the Fillmore with the Velvets. So many kids were still tripping, but the scene was clearly losing its momentum, and in another month journalists would be writing about what a complete mess Haight Ashbury had become—garbage and scummy soda stains on the sidewalks and the Day-Glo signs that had looked so great when they were new getting all horrible and dirty. October would be the month of the funeral procession through the streets for “Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media,” staged by all the original hippies who'd been really involved with organizing alternate community living and who now resented all the free-style young kids who'd come in during the summer who they called “irresponsible” hippies. There was a sense that autumn that the whole hippie thing had been ruined the summer before—made too big and commercial.

• • •

As we walked around, I realized that in San Francisco the Vietnam war seemed so much more real than it did in New York— if you stood by the bay, you could actually see ships leaving for Southeast Asia.

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls—blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked—stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

Most of the places around the area that had opened as “free” stores or service centers were starting to close down or go into debt. A lot of the hippies were leaving for communes all up and down the California coast and in western Colorado and New Mexico. In New York, the Diggers were only just about to open a free store (“Free Stew and Coffee”) on East 10th Street, right near where Paul lived, and Country Joe & the Fish had just played on the same street, in Tompkins Square Park, at a “smoke-in” where Frosty Meyers, the New York artist, had his laser going all around the sky.

Everybody in San Francisco seemed upset about all the amphetamine that was around that summer—especially the love children, who were embarrassed that so many people were taking it, because speed made you aggressive, it was everything that flower power was supposed to be against. But there really was every kind of drug you could imagine floating around out there.

We ran into a kid we knew from New York, Gary, walking along the street. He had short hair now and was wearing a sports jacket—he looked very square. But the accordion case he
was carrying turned out to be full of marijuana. We ducked into one of the lesbian strip joints where girls simulated sex things with other girls and there was a dancer who took people from the audience and whipped them. Gary lifted his jacket away from his back pocket and showed us one of those intercom beepers, which he used for communication with some sort of Drug Central. He'd been totally drug-free when we knew him back in New York—he was going to the School of Visual Arts. I asked him how he got involved in the dope business, and he said that for the couple of months before he left New York he was spending most of his time at school in the bathroom smoking joints that one of his teachers was always giving him. Then he and a friend of his went out to San Francisco where the friend knew some people. They rode over the Golden Gate Bridge out to this split-level house in Marin County. There was a Ferrari parked outside, and inside there was a few rock-and-roll bands' worth of equipment, and when you pressed a button, light shows went on all over the ceiling and beds started revolving. There were color TV's in all the bedrooms and all the bathrooms and the kitchen, and stereo sets in every broom closet.

“I went, ‘Gee, this is class!'” Gary said. “They told me,
‘Class? Man
, we're
poor
. We had a bad week, we only took in ten thousand.' And in the morning when we went down to the kitchen, the lady of the house was looking into the refrigerator at all these grains and vitamins and fruit juices and drugs. First thing, she took out a vial of long needle crystals and said, ‘What do you want to do today?' I said, ‘Pot would be fine.' But she's holding the crystals and saying, ‘I'm going to take some of this. Would you like some?' So I took some—and I thought I'd never be a human being again in my life…”

The stripper was whipping somebody at the next table. I said to Gary, “We heard you were hustling out here.”

He looked surprised and then very embarrassed. “Yeah, well…” I'd only said it to tease him, but now I could tell that I'd really hit on something.

“Just a little bit when I first got out here,” he said defensively, “a few guys rubbing up against you, jerking themselves off, blowing you—but listen, I myself have never blown anybody.”

We left the strip joint, said good-bye to Gary, and started walking again. Some sounds from a band rehearsing came out of a building we passed.

“Oh, God, the music in this city is so incredibly bad,” Paul started up again. “Just think about it: San Francisco has not managed to produce even one individual of any musical distinction whatsoever! Not a Dylan, not a Lennon, not a Brian Wilson, not a Mick Jagger—
nobody
. Not even a Phil Spector! Just some nothing groups and some nothing music. They delude themselves that music is a
group
thing—the way they think everything is….” Just then, the band got louder. “Really, listen to that,” he said. “Nothing but tired imitations of bad imitations of white imitations of Negro blues bands. The Beach Boys were the most wonderful group in America because they accepted life in California for the mindless glory it is, without apologizing for it or being embarrassed about it—just go to the beach, get a girl friend, get a suntan,
period
. And that was the most sophisticated approach you could have—musical instead of message-y. Of course, their greatest song, ‘God Only Knows,' was never the hit it should have been here in America.” He shook his head. “I just don't know….” The music got more and more frenzied. “Oh,
God! ”
Paul screamed, covering his ears. “Fortunately, they've
never come up with a melody, so none of this has to stick in your brain to torment you.”

On that trip we did some lectures at colleges and shot some footage for
Bike Boy
, but we never did come off cheerful enough to satisfy the San Francisco people—if you didn't smile a lot out there, they got hostile toward you.

Late one afternoon in September, Paul and I went over to the Hudson Theater to check out what kind of audience,
I a Man
was pulling in. We'd be opening
Bike Boy
there in a couple of weeks, and we wanted to see if the audience was laughing or jerking off or taking notes or what, so we'd know whether it was the comedy, the sex, or the art they liked.

We walked into the Hudson and sat down on a couple of scruffy-looking seats. There were a few college-type kids sitting together down front, and some raincoat people, alone, scattered here and there. It was the scene where Tom Baker is trying to turn on one of the girls and he says, “Why don't you relax?” and she tells him, “I don't know you well enough,” and then he asks her, “Does it turn you on that I'm sitting here naked?” and she tells him, “Well, if there was
music
I'd be turned on…”

We didn't stay too long—just long enough to see that the kids thought it was hilarious. On our way out, the box office guy told us that during lunch hour was when business was the best.

The more we hung around Max's, the more young kids we got to know. There were three tiny little girl beauties who were always there who'd been running around together for years— Geraldine Smith, Andrea Feldman, and Patti D'Arbanville. Patti
had grown up in the Village. Her parents still lived across from the Café Figaro, and that's where the girls would hang out till it closed for the night, and then go over to Patti's house to sleep. One night that fall at Max's, when everybody in the back room was totally silent, drawing in their trip books—with the exception of an outrageous queen who was doing a sort of interpretive dance on top of a table to the Supremes singing “Reflections”—I coaxed Geraldine to tell me about her background.