Memoirs of a beatnik Read online

Page 11


  The Pad — II

  All this while we were poor and getting poorer. There was a stretch of several months when we all four lived on sixty dollars a month, which I earned modeling. The rent was thirty-three dollars, and the lights and gas came to about seven or eight, so that left us about five dollars a week for food. We ate oatmeal a lot, and kidney beans or lentils with rice at night, and sometimes we had eggs for lunch, which we could get in the markets on Ninth Avenue for twenty-nine cents a dozen. Bacon ends and chicken gizzards were nineteen cents a pound. People came to dinner a lot, always at least two or three of them, and they knew that they should bring bread or firewood. They would arrive with stolen loaves, stale loaves, fresh, newly baked and bought French bread, whatever they could lay their hands on, and it would augment the bean soup and make it into a meal. Sometimes they brought wine. Or they would arrive, bundled up to the ears, with wood in tow: great six-by-six beams from old houses, doors, discarded furniture, which they would proceed to saw up in the living room, cursing and groaning, while the soup cooked.

  "They" would be Big John, who was an Ayn Rand addict, and Painter John, who was the youngest of us, sixteen at the time and, everybody said, a genius (though nothing ever came of it), and various dancer friends of Leslie's—tough little girls and fragile boys from Ballet Theatre with bags of rolls—and various actor friends of Pete's dropping in after an event at the Studio and stalking about the front room in their trenchcoats, bringing their conglomerate and heavy presences to bear wherever they paused. They often had money, and would bring cake and ice cream and other incongruous goodies; and it was their style that led us to coin the often-used phrase "Do it for the Studio"—applied whenever a situation or individual became ponderously dramatic and self-important.

  There was, too, a great miscellany of people that Susan and I had collected: Noah, a Bowery bum and eurhythmies expert, who would hold forth on the shattering beauty of sharing a studio in the nineteen-thirties-or was it the twenties?-with Malvina Hoffman, while his long, red, chapped hands fluttered in the air and his ragged coat flew open and flapped around him; and dykes who were plumbers or printers; and young jazzboys; and sad Bohemian longshoremen; and various Poundians we had discovered in

  The Pad — II

  bookstores. We would eat and talk and plan enormous projects in which all the arts would be combined and the programs written in Chinese. Everyone would get a little stoned, and then we would all go out and romp in Central Park, or go down to the pier and look at the river.

  When we wanted extra money for luxuries—dry cleaning, or a meal out so that we wouldn't feel too pushed—we would sell some books. Nearly everyone in the house had something going with the book clubs, especially the art book clubs that were flourishing at that time. Books arrived for us under all kinds of names, all over the city, and we duly sold them for a third of their list price, or traded them at Doubleday's for presents for each other.

  But finally in January it got really cold; for a while it was just too cold to sleep in the house, five below zero for a few days, I remember, and we all abandoned ship temporarily. Leslie gave up first, and went back to live with his parents in upstate New York. Then Pete, who had been flitting in and out of the scene anyway, took a (heated) furnished room a couple of blocks closer to the League with Big John, who had decided to become a painter in the best Fountainhead tradition. Don acquired the use of a Central Park South apartment, whose sad, gay owner was on a winter cruise. And O'Reilley and I took a job and moved into it.

  The job was in the tiny West Forties apartment of a public relations man named Ray Clarke. I wasn't ever sure exactly what he did, or what it was that we did for him. I only had the unformulated certainty that we were being used—by whom and for what nefarious purpose I could never determine. The only other person who ever gave me that feeling was Timothy Leary and that was years later.

  Ray lived in the bedroom of the apartment, in a great welter of files and tape machines. The bedroom was his sanctuary, his inner office. Here he lived in a maroon smoking jacket and slippers, and drank and smoked lots of cigars and did small black magics. Hardly noticeable, they changed almost nothing, but they kept the air around him moving, and they kept him rich.

  The living room of the place had a bar and a sunken goldfish pond, an enormous couch and two desks. It was there that Susan and I plied our labors. She mixed martinis. I typed small numbers

  The Pad — II

  of letters and answered the phone. We both got sent out for food, or cheesecake from the Turf at two a.m. We came to work at eleven at night and worked through the early morning, usually quitting sometime between seven and nine and falling out on the couch or the rug.

  Every night around eleven, which was just about when the shows let out, a stream of visitors would start flowing into Ray's living room: models, and gangsters, and would-be actors, call girls, gamblers, men from the clothing business, movie stars, composers, and publicity people. Everyone wanted something. There were people pursuing broads, by-lines, money, dope, parts, jewels, supper. Guys who talked legs, and guys who talked breasts, and guys who talked other guys. Girls with little dogs and big backsides, madames, and guys who sold questionable stock. They drank and talked and waited for the one with the role, the one with the magazine, the one with the chow mein. They were mean and ruthless and lecherous, and they thought of themselves as sentimental and sincere. They bought Susan and me three suppers a night because we sat there with holes in our sneakers and grinned.

  Ray was supposed to be an expert on getting your name in the columns of the local papers. In reality he was an expert on getting the big stars who were his clients to do what he wanted them to do, which was usually something that would make one of his clients—who wasn*t a big star yet—famous. The unknown paid Ray a whole lot of money. The big star didn't say no because Ray had too much unsavory information to release to the newspapers-information which he had mostly gleaned from his intercom system (always turned on) as he sat in his inner office, often with a wire recorder turned on beside it.

  Ray was always taking everything he could find off my desk: papers, poems., the books I was reading. I would have to go into his bedroom and steal it all back. He had a file in which he kept, alphabetically by author, every personal letter, postcard or photo he had every received, plus quips and quotes of the various souls who wandered through.

  "Honey," he would say, "you wanna be in Earl Wilson's column as the girl who went to visit Ezra Pound?"

  "No thanks, Ray," I would say, "I don't think it's a good idea."

  The Pad — II

  "OK, honey, it's your life, but you really need some publicity. Everybody needs publicity."

  I learned a lot from Ray.

  Learned to assume that everything was tapped; to get up and whisper if I had anything really interesting to say to anyone in a strange apartment. Learned not to leave pieces of paper lying around. Learned not to drink much with strangers, and never to trust theatre people. Pocketed innumerable taxi fares and took subways. Got smuggled in through the back doors of countless expensive restaurants because the people who were taking us out to dinner couldn't—or were ashamed to—bring us in through the front.

  Ray was also into some strange and unholy racket having to do with storm windows, but just what the scam was I never did figure out. All I knew was that the personnel on that one was really unsavory: scowling and unfriendly, with probably shoulder holsters.

  So Susan and I sat there and answered Ray's mail, and took strange tapes to detective agencies, and delivered mysterious bundles of papers in Queens through a taxi window, and met Marlon Brando, who looked bugged and sad, and was. All the time we were there he was being pursued by a noisy brunette named Margie whom he had dated once on orders: all in the game. Margie was one of Ray's "clients." She was in love with Brando because he had taken her to his hotel and played her Tosca all evening instead of trying to make out. And in love with Margie was Morris Kahn, a big, quiet guy in t
he clothing business. Morris paid Ray to do publicity for Margie; he also bought Susan some shoes and generally looked after us while he told us all about his troubles with his lady, who wanted him to be as "polite" as Brando.

  It was all amusing, but it wasn't serious. And after a while it got spooky. Billy Daniels got shot, and for reasons we couldn't quite follow that shook Ray up a lot. Then the little men with the storm windows began to assume threatening attitudes, and took to wearing their hats in the house and leaning on the bar morosely at ten o'clock in the morning—the very time when Susan and I liked to fall out on the big couch and sleep the day away. Ray began to talk about going to Bermuda for a while. We decided it was getting uncool, and it was now mid-February and warmer anyway, so we split and went home.

  The Pad — II

  When we got back we tried one other job. We were supposedly slinging hash on the weekends for an afterhours club in Harlem located in somebody's pad, but we wound up smoking opium with the guys on our first night there, and three days later found ourselves sitting in a large dark basement room watching a TV set with a red filter over the screen and the sound turned off, to the tune of a Sonny Rollins record, while all around us black girls in bright wigs—chartreuse and lavender—lounged on the fat old sofas and ate egg rolls. It was very jolly and friendly, but riding home next day in a taxi down the Westside Highway through a strangely distorted city, watching the cabdriver's head grow larger and smaller, we decided that though the job was a good one it took too much out of us and on Friday night when the guys showed up again to drive us to work, we regretfully told them so.

  The Pad — II

  114

  Organs And Orgasms

  jazz singer. Brenda was tiny and redheaded and a ball of fire, dressed always to kill in kelly green or bright yellow, and she thought she was Peggy Lee. She was in love with Kip the drummer, and Georgie was a little in love with each of them.

  On the third session that I went to, I lay down with Georgie on a dusty couch on a Saturday afternoon, after a full twenty-four hours of music. Lay down with him and unzipped his fly. Georgie was shy and fastidious. He stopped me and led us both into the bathroom, where we stood in the shower under a funky, slow stream of lukewarm water, and soaped ourselves with stolen motel soap slivers, and washed and slipped and slithered, falling soapy against each other, sliding thigh over slippery thigh. And kissed, ears and eyes full of water, and Georgie slowly got hard and large and I went down on him while drying him off on a raunchy bathmat that said "Hotel Marlton." We finished with me bent over the bathtub, and him slapping against me as he held me around the waist.

  After that Saturday afternoon, Georgie took to finding his way uptown every week or so, and we would make out together in my big new bed. He wasn't much of a lay as far as technique went, but he had an angelic quality that was really refreshing, left one rejuvenated, feeling very intense and peaceful. His body was slight, the skin of his stomach particularly pleasing: very pale and very smooth, and his stomach totally flat, with slender hips. His cock was not terribly big, was uncircumcised, and curved ever so slightly to the right when extended to its full length. He liked mostly to fuck, was not too much on games, preferred me to be on the bottom, was passionate, but briefly so. Innocent and keen-eyed. He often came before I did, which distressed us both, and he would finish by finger-fucking me. After a while we got better at each other's timing. He would usually enter the house silently, and I would awaken with a vague sense of someone else in the room to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, thoughtfully watching me sleep.

  Georgie brought me Antoine. I had invited him to dinner one evening, together with Kip the drummer and Brenda, and arrived back from a modeling job to find not Georgie or Kip, for*they hadn't come yet, but a huge, stalwart-looking, solemn-faced man

  Organs And Orgasms

  in tie and jacket sitting incongruously on a construction bench in front of the fire.

  "Hello," he intoned with heavy accent. "I am Annntoine."

  "Too much," says I, and it was.

  "Georrrrge invited me to meet him here for dinner."

  "He did, did he?" I muttered. Georgie was getting a bit far out for my taste.

  "Just pull out that end of the mattress, will you?" I asked as brightly as possible. "I want to finish making the bed."

  Antoine complied with solemn gallantry, inquiring the while, "And what—is yourrrr—philosophy?"

  "Catch," I said, and threw a corner of the blanket to him.

  He caught it and tucked it in, making really professional hospital corners while he continued, "Mine-is the philosophy-of rrresigned-desperation," as if he had rehearsed it, which I am sure now that he had.

  Antoine was truly and actually French, and a writer, he claimed, showing me once after two years' acquaintance a two-line poem: something about salt and snow and a young boy walking through, very white-on-white effect, very French, I remember thinking. He had had a whore for a mother, or at least a lady of very questionable virtue, and, apparently, a Jewish father who was a Communist heavy of some sort in Paris. He had spent his childhood on the streets, living in bombed-out buildings with roving gangs of kids like himself. He had stories to tell in which the oldest of the urchins, a girl of twelve, bullied them, fucked them, and mothered them, cooked and cleaned and sent them out to steal chickens, and, in real emergencies, went out and hustled for them. When he was about seven he was selling dirty pictures to the soldiers. First the German soldiers and then the American ones.

  I don't know how Antoine got to America, but he had, when I knew him, an American painter wife with a small but solid reputation, and a part-scholarship to NYU. We all got very fond of him, he had a mordant bitter wit and he came on like a G-man. When there was trouble, as there sometimes was, between us and the neighborhood street gang, I would go out with Antoine to the local hangout, and we would hold hands and drink a soda together, and generally make it known that he was my guy. His size alone was

  Organs And Orgasms

  impressive: he was six foot four and weighed about 220 pounds. And his trench coat harked back to forties tough-guy movies.

  He usually entered the house with a good bit of fanfare. I was awake as soon as he let himself into the kitchen, where he announced his presence by walking broodingly about. Then he would come into the front room and lie heavily on me while kissing me formally awake. He was good with his lips, as I have noticed Frenchmen are. They are not great cocksmen, being a little smug in that area, but they do tend to have good mouths. Great tongue-in-ear people, neck-nibblers, and cunt-eaters.

  Antoine could usually be induced to get out of his clothes, but it wasn't easy: he operated on the principle that anytime, anyway, anywhere was the way to fuck, like on the floor if somebody was crashing in the bed. He was very insulted the time I refused, the kitchen floor being a bit too grungy for me. He expected me to be hot at a moment's notice, and I could usually oblige, for that spring I went to bed expecting someone or something to happen, and the nights when it didn't were fortunately rather rare.

  He liked to go down on me, and had a good repertoire of tongue rhythms and twirls. He also like for me to suck him off. He was very meticulous about how; had a whole routine worked out of the rhythms and pacing he liked best. It was actually a bit like taking an exam. He always asserted that French girls went down on you best, claimed it was cultural—they were trained from the cradle in phallic worship by their mothers.

  He was only a fair lay; his girth turned me off—that, and the fact that he almost never took his socks off. His cock was thick but rather short, and although thick cocks are nice, and make you feel good and full, I myself have never found that width made up for length-I like to feel them touch my cervix. Then too, he was inordinately involved with technique: fucking him was rather like a class in acrobatics, with a little hatha yoga thrown in on the side.

  But fuck him I did, and fairly often. There was something strangely comforting about him: something solid and manl
y after all the boys I'd been going to bed with.

  Like Don, for instance. He was still on the scene, would come over, silent and long and sad, and slip into bed. Or more often would wake me by whispering that he had a taxi waiting, and why

  Organs And Orgasms

  didn't I go with him, hack to his pad on Central Park South. And I would get up and scramble into some tattered jeans and we would cab back through the city and slip past the disapproving doorman. He would have put on the electric coffeepot before he left, and the coffee would be ready and the phonograph would still be playing as we walked in. We would wander from room to room over the pale blue wall-to-wall carpet, shedding our clothes. We would switch from coffee to cognac, shower in the dazzling bathroom, rubbing each other down with the thick, deep-colored towels and exotic Indian oils, and wind up on the huge bed in the draperied bedroom.