Memoirs of a beatnik Read online

  The Pad — I

  And then, within two weeks Norm and Gypsy came back from their camping trip and the warm comfort of the bookstore was gone. It was too hectic by now to be on the streets and the dawns were chilly sometimes, so I took the money I had saved and rented a pad that Dirty John was leaving: a cold-water flat uptown on 60th Street, where Tenth Avenue becomes Amsterdam Avenue, at the north end of Hell's Kitchen. It was a good big pad with high ceilings and a fireplace in the large front room, two middle rooms of fair size, and a real hole of a kitchen with the bathtub next to the sink—the tub had a cover you used to drain the dishes—an antique stove decorated in green enamel with a high oven and three burners, and a small greasy window looking out on an airs haft. It was a good pad because of the size of the front room, because the fireplace worked, and because it cost thirty-three dollars a month.

  The John was in the hall, was unspeakably dirty, and could not be cleaned no matter what, because it was only one flight up and therefore used by every bum in the neighborhood who was sober enough to make it up the stairs. On cold mornings we would often find a body or two asleep there. Impossible to lock, the only thing that ever happened when we tried to lock it was the lock got stolen, ripped out of the rotten wood. Impossible to keep toilet paper, or even light bulb, in there: such was the poverty of the place that both were copped immediately. When you went to the John you took toilet paper and light bulb in with you. Or, if no spare bulb was handy, you took the flashlight which was kept on top of the refrigerator.

  It was a lovely pad, one of the best I ever had, and I look back on it with great fondness to this day. The life I lived in it was the simplest, kindest, and most devoted life I have ever managed to live, the friends were fine, the goals were clear and set.

  When we first moved in there was j ust me and Susan O' Reilley. We made a real living room of the front room, with an old studio couch that had been left behind by a former tenant, roommate of Dirty John's; an ancient drawing table; a desk and chair from my parent's house; and a few long benches of weathered, unpainted wood which we had stolen off the construction lots of newly-fashionable high-rise apartment buildings. The benches we were especially fond of, because when we ran out of firewood we burned them without compunction and simply went out for more as they

  were needed.

  The Pad — I

  We slept in the larger of the two middle rooms, on a bed that was nothing but a bed frame with some wooden slats across it and an old cotton-stuffed mattress on top of that. The lumpiest and most uncomfortable bed I ever slept in, ten times more uncomfortable than sleeping on the floor, but we were somehow attached to the idea of Bed, of being raised off the floor. The bedroom had a door to the outside, which we bolted with a two-by-four and huge iron bolts after Little John, who is not to be confused with Dirty John, and who was by then O'Reilley's ex-lover, broke in and took the place apart while looking for her (she and I having hitchhiked to Cambridge to get out of his way). Over the bolted door we hung a precarious bookcase. And that, and an ancient desk, relic of my childhood which we carted out of Brooklyn in a borrowed van, completed the furnishings of the "bedroom."

  The smaller middle room we immediately dubbed The Woodshed and filled with cartons and barrels of wood for the fireplace: wood copped off construction sites, or donated by the place around the corner between Tenth Avenue and the river which crated automobiles for shipping overseas. No one in those days had heard of beatniks or hippies, and so the guys who worked there were cheerful and friendly, and cut us lots of good red oak whenever their boss was away, cut it to the size of our fireplace on their powerful electric saws, grinning and talking the while as we stood in the bright, chilly place with our shopping carts, the acrid smell of the cut wood and the clear chilly air off the river making us high. It took about four cartloads a day to keep us warm, but on good days when the scrap barrels were full, or when we felt particularly energetic, we would get many more and fill the woodshed even fuller for the colder times to come. Woodshed was a word we were very fond of, because of Mezz Mezzrow's book, Really the Blues, which was one of the things we read that filled our heads with a way of talking and a way of being, and in it the word "woodshedding" is what you do when you hole up and practice your art, in his case jazz, to the exclusion of all else. Woodshedding was pretty much the rule of life at the Amsterdam Avenue pad, and a Woodshed made it even more so, more real. The only thing in the room besides the endless boxes of wood and a long low pile of two-by-fours and four-by-fours to saw up in a real emergency, was an

  The Pad — I

  old, unfinished dresser full of all our clothes and on top of it a file drawer full of all our collected works.

  That was about it. When Susan and I arrived the house was awash in slivers of wood and tiny bits of paper, chewed and clawed by rats into all kinds of comfy and luxurious rat-dwellings. It took us a full month to get the garbage out, and for months there was a large charred hole in the floor, right in front of the fireplace. "Oh that," said Dirty John, when he showed us the place, "was where I dropped a burning log and forgot to pick it up." The beams under the floor were charred and partly gone: the house must have come close to burning down. One day the following spring a good dyke friend arrived with electric saw and spent two or three days carefully fitting pieces of our firewood into the hole and making the floor good and whole again, but for that first winter we lived with it as it was, and a wind came through it.

  Soon after we moved in, Rene Strauss, our street hustler friend from downtown, came to stay with us and the couch in the living room became a bed. Rene was a good roommate: almost never home, he turned up whenever he scored some money and took us gleefully out to breakfast. His scathing remarks on our lives and affairs-in the mordant tradition of "faggot wit"-kept us in humor and perspective most of the time. His two flaws were that he stole all our best clean clothes to wear when he went out cruising, and always refused to get out of bed in the morning.

  Getting out of bed in the morning wasn't easy, as it was cold and got colder as time went on. I would usually do it first, and stomp about putting on Levis and sweatshirt (my eternal costume), and brushing my crew-cut (I had by then cut my hair). Then I'd pull on my stolen, black leather, fur-lined gloves, slide into a motorcycle jacket given me by Little John (we were the same size), pull on my black army-surplus boots, and, armed with the shopping cart, go out for wood. Two or three trips up the stairs with a full cart did wonders towards waking me up and getting my circulation going, and I would start a fire and make an enormous pot of oatmeal, singing and muttering the while, in order to warn Rene, who had probably come in at dawn, and O'Reilley, who could always sleep longer, no matter how long she had slept, that I was about to wake them. Coffee made and oatmeal bubbling, I

  The Pad — I

  would stand in the front room and loudly and obnoxiously announce breakfast to the snoring, blanket-clutching household, and the day would begin.

  The Pad — I

  The Pad — II

  heard through the grapevine that Montgomery Clift among others had a crush on him, and that it was he who was supplying these goodies, but Don wouldn't talk about it, would merely hand me meat or cash, turn on a record, and go sit down by the fire.

  Then there was Leslie. Leslie was our faggot. Every house needs one, to keep it cheered up and silly, to take care of the plants and the candles, to bring some style into slum living. Leslie had been a pianist, but while studying at the Juilliard School of Music had been compelled by the requirements of the curriculum to take a modern dance class. This class completely amazed him and turned him on. He began to discover his body, to go downtown for ballet class, and he eventually threw over ten years of concert piano prep and dropped out of Juilliard—he was on scholarship—to go to the Ballet Theatre School and become a dancer. He was beautiful and sad and fragile and gay. And gaily, wistfully, in love with Susan.

  Both Ballet Theatre and the Art Student's League were within three or four block
s of the house, and our lives centered on the West Fifties all that year, becoming more closed and tight as we all settled down to our first year of serious work. In the morning Leslie and Pete would leave for their respective classes, Don would put on a record—a scratchy Miles rendition of "Walking" or some early Billie Holiday, on our twelve-dollar phonograph ("box" as we then called it). O'Reilley would stretch out on the couch in front of the fire and immerse herself in Spengler's Decline of the West, all two of which fat and morose volumes she read in the course of that winter, taking notes the while. I would study Homeric Greek out of an 1890's grammar I had discovered in my aunt's attic in Queens. At lunch time we would all go out, to gather either at the cafeteria of the Art Students' League, or at the Chock Full O'Nuts across from Ballet Theatre. There we would eat such twenty-five-cent sandwiches as we could afford: lettuce and tomato, or cream cheese on date-nut bread, and exchange the news and discoveries of the morning over cups of extra-sweet coffee.

  The afternoon would find us all at work again: me and Susan scribbling in notebooks, Pete drawing elaborate still lifes of the coffeepot or the chair, and Leslie off to another class or a rehearsal. Don would go down to Cromwell's Drugstore, the hangout for out-of-work actors who were supposedly making the rounds,

  The Pad — II

  where he would consume his fifty-cent minimum and listen to his friends talk shop. If the day was fine, Pete and Susan and I would take our notebooks to Central Park and scramble among the rocks or watch the ducks between poems and drawings; if not, we would stay home and huddle around the fire, or type on our ancient and decrepit typewriter with fingers stiff with cold.

  The southern boundary of our world was Fiftieth Street, where there was a Longley's Cafeteria in which all of the coffee after the first cup was free, and poisonous—it being left all afternoon on hotplates with the cream already in it growing thick and curdly. There we would sometimes hide ourselves to read or write the afternoon away, watching the folk enter and leave, and making the acquaintance of some of the loquacious and eccentric old people for whom New York then still had time and space.

  Within these limits were to be found the Donnell Library which had just opened, with its clean, glorious bathrooms, plenteous hot water and warmth, rugs in the sitting area, comfortable couches, and records to take out; and the Museum of Modern Art, to which we had year-long three dollar artists' passes, which let us in free to see an endless stream of Dietrich, von Stroheim, Lang, Garbo, etc., turning us on for the first time to what that world of celluloid and flickering darkness was really about.

  The Museum also boasted a cafeteria with seats on an inner courtyard, where we could sit among pretentious sculpture when the weather was fine, and drink and eat a fifty-cent afternoon tea consisting of tiny tasteless sandwiches and pale burnt-sienna liquid; and a penthouse restaurant, to which our three-dollar passes did not admit us. However, we had found a way up a back staircase that let us slip unnoticed into the penthouse, and would often repair thither to meet some of Pete's or Don's more prosperous actor friends who affected the more costly yearly memberships and bought us slender pastries while we listened to the theatre gossip.

  And the paintings. In those days one could still manage to see the paintings at the Museum of Modern Art-it's been years since I've been able to do so. Nowadays there are always Heads, millions of Heads, between me and any work of art. Kit's an opening night, the heads are likely to be well-groomed and finely perfumed. If not, they are apt to affect the latest Ohio hairstyles and Sears

  The Pad — II

  Roebuck coats, and to be equipped with loud, raucous voices. But in any case, there is no hope of seeing a painting unless you steal it, and take it home, and lock the door, hang it on your wall, and sit down. But then there weren't really very many people at museums, especially during the week, and one could settle quietly in the Brancusi room (holy, dusty air like a church) or on a hard bench in front of the Monet "Waterlilies" (since burned up), and scribble and daydream and feast on detail and color, or walk around a sculpture, examining it from all angles, backwards, or lying down under it, and scribble, and pick your teeth, and write a letter, and scribble, and take off your shoes. . . .

  The northern limit of our country was Sixty-Fifth Street. It was there that Raphael Soyer had his studio in a musty old building known as the Lincoln Arcade, with spaced-out wrought-iron elevator cages and spaced-out elevator operators, and many teeming pimps and dealers and hustlers and housewives bustling about the ground floor where the shops were, and the lovely off-white light and opulent solidity of the areas of New York that were built during the last days of American prosperity, during the end of the nineteenth century. That area is now Lincoln Center, where I went once and thought I was in an airline terminal, and tried to see a movie, and it was like seeing a movie in a hospital, or a refrigerator. But then there were still Czechoslovakian voice teachers, Russians who had studied with Jung, violinists from the Balkans, Latvian translators, little professional people in big coats, living in that area, bundled and brisk at the markets, and I would go there about three days a week and sit in the airy, still light of Raphael's studio and he would paint me and ask me sad patient questions about my house and life, wondering at it all sadly, but constantly curious, like a rather bold sparrow. Or Susan and I would go together. He did a huge painting of the two of us naked and standing together, holding hands in front of a rumpled bed, a painting that he then considered too outrageous to show, and after working on it for three or four months, put it away for as many years.

  On West Sixty-Fifth Street, too, was my modest equivalent of Don's outrageous luxury: a shrill-voiced, angular, sad-eyed psychology major named Betty McPeters, who had a crush on me and fed us all steaks and strawberries in her tiny West Side apartment every week or so in order to get me to come over for the evening.

  The Pad — II

  Betty's desires never managed to get even vaguely sexual; the most she could do was to stroke my hair, or my hand, purring "nice," like a cat. A pathetic creature. We would sit on her couch or her rug and devour huge amounts of food and chat with her friends: a Lower East Side book-thief-turned-priest named Bradley Dump-kin and a round, jolly black earth mother, Beatrice Harmon, who at last count had had four babies and as many nervous breakdowns (one after each baby). Wit was supposed to be brilliant and biting, and sometimes was. Records were all pre-1750, the atmosphere rarified and slightly collegiate. There were many paperback books about things. Betty's house was a good vacation, a reminder of how the rest of the world lived and thought, and afterwards we would trot gratefully home to our freezing, empty barn of an apartment, our silly, unintellectual conversation, and our lentil soup.

  By mid-November it was too cold for any of us to preserve the slightest desire for privacy or solitude. We opened the studio couch to its full width and pulled it in front of the fire, and all took to tumbling into it together at night. The studio couch had a crack down its middle, which seriously limited the gradations and subtlety of physical contact possible between us. That, and the crowding. Usually four of us would be in bed, and one would stay up and keep the fire going: the wood scraps which we got for free didn't burn very long, and there was no way to "bank" a fire and have it burn all night. It was a good feeling to settle down for the night with a full wood box and a book, keeping watch while the rest of the "family" slept snug and content. On warmer nights, when we could afford to let the fire go out and make do with the heat of the oven, four rooms away, the fifth one of us would climb into the slatted bed in the middle room and go to sleep luxuriously alone.

  The Pad — II

  sucking off Leslie. Don's hand is still in me, and as he rides O'Reilley he reaches over and kisses me on the mouth. We all four are moving in one rhythm, the bedspring is grooving with it. Don's hand slides out of me, and something else slides in. It is Pete's cock, I decide. I recognize the smell of his hair oil. He has shed pants and shoes and is lying on me in his shirt. I let Leslie's dick slip out
of my mouth and start kissing Pete. The bed is crowded; I turn onto my side, turning Pete with me, tucking my knee up into his armpit. Leslie had been kissing O'Reilley's eyelids, now he slips back down on the outside edge of the bed, sliding his wet cock along my side. O'Reilley and Don nearly fall out of bed, and they move on down closer to our feet where there is more room. I hear Don's sex sounds, reticent growls, and they really turn me on. I feel something poking around with my ass and it is Leslie. I have my back to him. I take my knee out from under Pete's armpit and stretch my leg over his shoulder to give Leslie more room to work, and feel his hands open my ass and his long cock work its way in. I picture the two cocks, Pete's and Leslie's, rubbing against each other through the thin flesh wall inside me. Brothers. Far out. A Good Night.

  Maybe we all come once and then maybe Pete sucks Leslie off, Leslie goes down on O'Reilley, while Don and I watch. I guess then Pete would build up the fire, and we would smoke some hash. The wind comes up, it gets much colder, O'Reilley and Pete curl up around each other and go to sleep in the covers. Don starts nuzzling my neck, and we fuck dog-fashion, and Leslie comes up behind Don and slips it in, and we set up some kind of crazy syncopated rhythm that gets the bed rocking again, and Pete and O'Reilley sleep on. Finally we all go to sleep, just before dawn, with one numb arm each stuck under somebody else, and Don's feet sticking out of the covers because he's too long. Maybe Silver and Daddi-0, our house cats, come and sit on his feet to warm them and purr through our dreams.

  The Pad — II

  A Night By The Fire: What Actually Happened

  Or maybe not. Pete is poking the fire, and the cheap old phonograph is playing the same Stan Getz record over and over. Don is sitting on the edge of the bed, playing drums with the poker against the fireplace. O'Reilley is lying next to the fire reading Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young. The fingers of her left hand play idly with Don's back under his shirt but he doesn't notice. Leslie is lying next to her, flat out on his back, smoking and looking at the ceiling. He has had two dance classes and is exhausted. I am on the cold side of the bed, away from the fire, but I have made up for it by going to bed in sweatpants and sweatshirt. I have a wool cap pulled down over my crew-cut and the covers up to my chin and only my nose and the lower part of my eyes are showing. I am rapping at Pete through the blankets about the surrealists. He grunts whenever I stop but probably doesn't hear anything at all. He is painting. Leslie hands me his cigarette to put out and I put it out on the floor. He says "Goodnight," and turns on his side, his back to me. He has a beautiful body, but his obvious indifference leaves him unattractive and me bored. O'Reilley has finished reading Kropotkin and puts it down on the floor by her side of the bed. "What a shame," she says about nothing special. Don stops drumming and stands up. "I'm going out," he says. "I'll be back in a while." He bends and kisses O'Reilley on the forehead, mumbles, "Good-bye, Baby," and splits. Pete fixes the fire and starts drawing a picture of the three of us going to sleep. We are curled up, spoon fashion, all on our right sides, facing the fire. My nose is cold. My nose is always cold, and usually numb. I stick it deliberately into Leslie's back to warm it. He jumps a little, in his sleep.