(photo: Duncan Hannah)

Preface.

When working Savran’s Books on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank Campus in 1973 visiting poetess Patti Smith suggests, “You should go to New York, they’d like you there,” and she told me I looked like James Dean. I don’t. This after Steve and I, drunk, heckled her during her reading at Macalester College : “Yah, Yah, Rimbaud! Rimbaud! In his BVDs! HA!”

I’d been plotting my escape from Minneanopolis for a year., as I had good reasons to deplore familiarity.  A year and a month later, first night out of Cheesetown and I’m in Warhol’s Factory on Union Square West before we’re over to Max’s Kansas City meeting friends I still have. I did my stint on Duncan Hannah and Kitty Sondern’s couch, 16^th St. Once we lured David Hockney and Henry Geltzahler over , which is a long story, our high school buddy thing was essentially over.  We irremediably differed.  I never again saw things his way sympathetically.  Liquor had something to do with it.  Next I did a stint in a 7 floor McDougal St walk up with Rob Duprey, then rock guitarist for Lance Loud’s Mumps, before lining up a loft in what was a thermometer factory, where Kramer and I’d resume the mad-ass exercise in the arts of intoxication we’d had several high-wire years pursuing in the Greater Metropolitan Area, or, Twin Cities.  All we had to do was clean it up and build a shower.

Nights I’d prowl over the pages that’d guide me through the urban bush of Auden, Burroughs, Corso and Warhol, making time with a who’s who of Late-Literate New York art and society.  4^th Ave., where I worked the bookstores of Fred and Ben Bass, Jack Biblo, Walter Goldwater and Bill French. Downtown early morning after hours venues for Midnight Cowboys, dealers, models and their ambiguous artists. New York City’s Needle Parks have dollars running in their veins, pretty children, corrupted by art, martyred on toilets off alphabetized avenues. All the cliches.

Uptown beauties, intoxicants, celebrities, aesthetics, art, affluence. Before the epidemics my journals trade in the tropes of a belle epoch divine decadence that flourished before “the terrors of sudden contemplation.” The New York Dolls scene at The Mercer Art Center had come and collapsed. We frequented Max’s, CBGB’s, 1 Fifth Ave, The Locale on Waverly Place (where Julian Schnabel was the short order cook), Micky Ruskin’s 1 University Place, Cedar Tavern and Bradley’s on University Place, Paul’s Lounge on 3^rd Ave. (where I met Charlie Mingus and the Ramones), The 55, the beatnik jazz bar next to the Stonewall, Lady Astor’s, for fashionistas, The Mushroom on 13^th St, to shoot pool and drink with Mohawks, the transvestite bar Club 82, and Vaudeville era Bowery Boy dive bars out of Reginald Marsh.

We partied art until death did we part. R.I.P. Steven Grant Kramer : The best to do.

*

June. Upper West Side.

The Salon d’Art Societé was formed by and around the natty David Walter McDermott during his stint at Syracuse University, where he was pursuing a career as an eccentric, an ideal he upholds as his creative outlet, as an embodiment of out-of-date principles, of turn of the century, vintage, in homage to Oscar Wilde. His circle was at a ripe and impressionable age and, as he puts it, he “decorated them” as he does his environs, in his chosen fashion. The gents were wax collared, pomaded, styled slick as a John Held caricature of a crooner. The ladies posed as arm rests.

When the look was perfected, when they felt that New York City desperately needed their society, they came here to West 82^nd Street and, as a group effort, transformed David’s apartment into the time capsule I shared with him through a hard winter, to embellish and state their New Manner.

“The Society was founded upon hate,” David explained to me. The manifestations of that spirit were not long in destroying his work, which was nothing less than “A futuristic society based in the past.”  The founder’s mission was to use snobbery to keep the newly decorated in their proper place.” Hate was not too strong a word, actually. It didn’t take David’s cohorts long to recoil in disappointment, and disgust, when they found themselves being the fodder of someone else’s rather fruitful imagination and victims of a power play.

The highlight and breaking point of the slow burning resentment coincided with the occasion of their cumulative efforts, The Grand Ball. The preparations were extensive. The invitations were engraved by Tiffany’s, the apartment decorated to the height of fashion, circa 1928, a chinoiserie added, formally attired help hired, flowers arranged. The puzzled, curious guests were chosen as persons who might further The Salon’s members in society and market place.

The invitations read:

Miss Fern Walker Alexander Countess Daria Dolby

Mr. George Hasbrouck Mr. Kirk Stirling

Mr. Joseph Livingston Astor Mr. David Walter McDermott

Le Salon d’Art Societé

request the pleasure of your company

at a grand ball

on 1886

at o’clock

R.S.V.P.

Mr. David Walter McDernott

8 West 82^nd Street

When the big night came, they were announced with great import and received by a line of their hosts in stuffed shirts with stiff manners in a stiff setting. The press were the guests. It was a joke that escaped everyone. The guys from the press waited for the guests of honor to arrive only to find themselves it and on the spot. The Ball’s purpose, the guest’s duty, was to make the Salon members famous. The guests were puzzled as to who their hosts actually were, for their disguises were so clever there must be ambiguous meanings to the people underneath them. and what all of this was for. They were bewildered sufficiently so that when their hosts told them that they weren’t what they appeared to be nobody believed them.

McDermott addressed them: “The Salon members say, here we are. We are beautiful. We are wonderful. Make something of us. Now, who are you, anyhow?”

The only evidence that the Salon ever existed is this “albatross” of an apartment, which David’s parents feel obliged to support. Albatross was the term his mother used for the place when she gave me an emotional run down of “his existence” from her point-of-view over the telephone one day. There was a last attempt at reviving The Salon last spring with David’s exhibition of Duncan’s collages. David says he was charmed by Duncan’s struggling pretty boy artist image, not his “homosexual art” which, he feels, “needs to be decorated.”

This time David was going to introduce Duncan to Society. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘I made that boy,” he told me. Again the stately salon was decorated, the collages “decorated” in large wallpaper frames against contrasting wallpapered walls that overwhelmed the works themselves. Duncan himself was decorated in Udo Kier’s tailored tuxedo (David’s) Dracula fashion. There was a falling out at the last minute when Duncan insisted on wearing beaten up tennis shoes, devaluating David’s Dada into a second-class prep school sight gag.

It ruined the evening for David, who now realized he was not only patronizing bad art but now an artist with sophomoric taste. Neither did his cronies show up and the raison d’etre, besides making the boy, was showing that he could make a go of it without them. For those who did show, once the portentous airs on display were dismissed as a case of the Emperoress’s New Clothes the affair turned into a drunken brawl after which nobody even got laid.

I didn’t blame them for not showing. The show was prefaced by a catastrophe McDermott staged in the King Cole Room of the St. Regis Hotel, Dali’s harem, introducing Duncan, Kitty and I, the “new friends,” to the “old friends” that composed the Society d’Arte. Fern and David played out a sado-masochistic scene in which she verbally abused him – “You’re a conniving little weasel who means no one any good” – while he beamed with pride at having blown her cool.

Later Minnesota painter James Crosby, with whom I’d done a late ‘60s hippy turn in the Bay Area, brought to my attention that David is one of those white men LeRoi Jones was referring to when he said, “The difference between white men and black men is that white men hate living things.”

Min writes from home: “My thoughts have been mixed around lately. I wish you were here to be by me. I know I’d be cured of this disease, or whatever it is. Love you forever and ever, Min.”

*

The Lives of the Artists, NYC 1976

When Kramer and his stripper-bride, Jean “Bean” Marie Youngstrom arrive from Minneapolis we move into the mercurial loft on 14^th St. and dementia follows. Duncan and I not wanting to be in the same room together is no longer practical so we’ve politely put our differences aside. The poets Paul Bray and Jim Gardner make their appearances. The former sang his newest work: “I’m hip, I’m hip all the way. I was into beards but beards are passé.”

Bean, brand new in town, has struck up an unlikely friendship with McDermott, who hates women. Steven brings with him samples of the automata “Boxes” he’s been working on the past year. This one has a big electric power switch next to a little shadow box window wherein a little sailor doll is neatly strapped into an electric chair: pull the switch and electrocute the bald baby who hops and twitches real life-like, a regular homicidal maniac, with a bad case of sniperism. Steve doesn’t requirea brush stroke to sign his name. Nothing could be more Kramer.

4 a.m. we make a beer run to Smiler’s and have our first chat. The marriage I best-manned is falling apart for the same reason that steers us from the deli to buzzing into an afterhours joint on 3^rd and 23^rd where a dozen plus black guys are hangin’ out drinking Reingold and listening to polka. Go figure.

I got Steve a job at this sad bookshop I’m working at on Park Row that pays better than the Strand. In two days we’re on a first name basis with Jim, the bartender at Suerkun’s on the corner of Park Place and Church across City Hall park from fuckin’ Lorry’s Book dump. By mid-week we’re getting dashed one for one and eavesdropping on Norman Mailer bullshitting. “Since 1860 racehorses have come and gone and the season’s change but it’s always the same here,” says the benevolent Irish Jim. Great oysters. Kramer’s fired the following week. I follow soon thereafter.

As a final gesture of contempt for the sick shit I worked for, the mama’s boy with the psychosomatic bum leg and the “Poor Me” thing that never stopped, I swept a table of new releases onto the floor, handed the keys to the lame brained Jesus freak who lived in a Christian commune on Church St whose entire wages went to tide, announced I was making him Assistant Manager and leaving. “But, but, but…” he handed me back the keys so I took ‘em out front and pegged them across Park Row into City Hall Park.

As he went after them I headed for the 6 train and so much for that job. From the Chelsea Hotel I made a call to Pace University informing them their bookshop was buying books they knew were stolen from the store charging them twice. Not long after I was gone, Al, his mother, and a rather impressive collection of civil service exams were gone and J&R Music, my favorite record store, took over the space.

*

We secured the loft on 14^th Street and if we’re not working together much longer, we’ll be living together again. For the past 35 years it’s been a thermometer factory. Gay ‘90s tin ceilings, wood floors beaded with mercury, dramatic sky-lights, turn of the century rustication from whatever horrible toxic fumes have been rising from that merc’ all those intoxicating years. We swept up dustpans full. No hot water, no shower, no appliances, and now we got no jobs.

We scrounge most of the fixtures from the street. 14^th Street was the inspiration for DeKooning’s Woman and Bean is becoming them. “Crazy as two waltzing mice,” you ask me. The soap opera All My Children’s all she can talk about, otherwise its Andy of Mayberry. Maybe she’s good in bed but nobody ever mistook her for anything more’n a stripper, which was sufficient to her role as Artist’s model/muse.

Our elevator operator, Manny, was falsely reported to the police as running a den of Communist anarchists in his basement Karate school/reading room. Actually he and his friends gather for work-outs and talk like born again Christians do after dying the first time. Police got a call he was planning on fire bombing our building. He wasn’t very terrifying. Someone, probably him, stole a television set. Unfortunately, we had two.

The loft’s five floors above PR sidewalk stalls, solvaki shops with lambs sweating on their spits get on you like a Francis Bacon cadaver, three floors above Dramatis Personae’s All-Male Revue. Our house warming party coincided with anthropologist pal JP laying over in NY long enough to drop by with a bottle of Old Crow. Someone else brought a half-gallon of vodka. The usual crowd may have as easily been put together on 22^nd Street in Minneapolis until Amos Poe dropped by to show his movie, Unmade Beds with this blonde wonder from Ohio..

“To fall, to be scoffed at, spit on and beat,” he’d recall the evening later on. I’d seen the mess before and couldn’t be so bored as to sit through it again and went out on the roof to smoke reefer. We have a beautiful roof deck. Everyone was sufficiently intoxicated not to let how bad this movie really is pass without comment. Steven did everything in his power not to let the film be shown: screaming and standing in front of the screen, falling and biting the audience, finally beating Bean up until Clifford and Li interceded.

Maybe it had something to do with all the mercury we absorbed turning the factory into living quarters. Saturday night at the Cedar Tavern, drunk, I read everybody and made a perfect ass of myself. I made Kitty and Crosby cry. I had no kind words for her boyfriend and called Jim, long time my best friend, an Old Hen. Only Steve and Bean were spared my wrath, not that they didn’t deserve it. After all, I had to go to work. M-F were keeping me up all night with lame antics they called “Art”.

I felt better Sunday, about everything. Painted the Kramer’s loft “two coats in a single afternoon,” like Hitler. Monday hung with PB brainstorming the script of an existentialist scenario to be titled The Foreigner for cineaste Amos Poe to feature that existentialist hero, Duncan Hannah. Daft.

Tuesday went to hear Nelson Algren read. He lived up to my high expectations with greatest hits from The Last Carousel, reading The Mad Laundress of Ding-Dong Daddyland. Thursday night was rock night at Max’s Kansas City but who remembers such things for being there.

*

Me on the 7^th Avenue local, buying bourbon, 14^th and 3^rd Avenue, in the rain eating 40¢ pizza, eavesdropping, again, on Reginald Marsh/Nelson Algren girls talk trash about the bartender’s “wife-in-law.” “If I was smart I’d get out of here,” he says. “What’s he think this is? A taxi cab?” Neon Wilderness red lights reflected off wet black asphalt at Union Square. “What do I think of all this? Up with the birds! Let your breath be a sewer.” “I wonder what’s showin’ at the movies?” “So, how much is a dime bag?”

*

Threw a dinner party wherein our crew met Amos Poe and cast over excessive drug and Pernod. Something of a blur. I walked Patti Astor, in High heels, across 14^th Street. The barker at the Varsity, a former burlesque theater presently pushing porn, thinking us a “cute couple” invited us in for free, which, given our susceptible state, worked great. Then I, gentlemanly-like, steered the bombshell up tenement stairs to doorstep:”No Keys!” says damsel in this dress (!). Never fret, yr Blondness, I was up roof, down fire escape, and, with my pocket knife, B-I-N-G-O, through the window and between the sheets with Barry White for soundtrack. Whew.

*

Min’s over it back home in the suburban sprawl. The ‘rents have ruined home life with sports bolstering crossed over the top. She’s going to France to go to the Sorbonne instead of high school in Hopkins and live with my ex-sweetheart and nobody’s interested for all their jock talk. As she’ll be coming thru here, I, for one, was pleased to hear that the poet Bray gave his pedophilic porn collection to a degenerate named Rizzler while on a drunk at the Jersey shore, convinced that entertaining these fantasies in such a delicate mental/emotional state would lead to irreversible sexual inversion and possibly crimes leading to some serious jail time. I thought he’d be an even worse influence than I approved of.

It was disgusting porn: 8 year old Mexican girls drinking piss, face smeared, dripping cum, and offering virgin bum to anal humping and hairless pussy to peckers the size of baseball bats, their titless chest heaving sighs that say, “Please don’t hurt me Mister – I’ll do anything you say!”

That ain’t right. Maybe my parents were right about my friends being a lousy influence on my little sister, who’s got a dirty enough mind.

*

I am staying here, getting my own house together in New York … and not get drunk. That bookstore was a trip. There was a guy, Big Lou, at Lorry’s who was like mad Joe, the mnemonist picker at the Strand. They’re Orthodox guys, black pants, white shirts, horn rims, who know everything and rant.

Bookselling can be more a vocation than an occupation.

Never the owners but to the devoted help in bookshops are what make it interesting. There was a Trinidadian cat there named Benny who explained the game of Cricket to me sufficiently to appreciate this C.L.R. James book he turns me on to, Beyond the Boundries. Remarkable. He took me to watch cricket, played here on warm spring days in Central Park by gentlemanly West Indians with a passion baseball will never replace. Subtle, subtle’s the way Benny explains it all.

James’s book on Melville’s even better.

Hip young New York’s only so integrated, composed as it is of “characters,” stereotypes are common fodder for artsy arch ironies that barely include blacks but absolutely exclude Latinos. I don’t believe I’ve cracked any code but partying is breaking it down. Mix-tapes spilling out of the shabby storefronts on 14^th Street. Do the Hustle and Disco Duck animating afternoon errands. Ghetto blaster cacophonies cured in borough parks in consensus to WBLS: (and all the colored girls sing…) “Frankie Crocker.” A, E, A, E, I owe you, and sometimes Why? Or G. Keith Alexander. As nonsensical as Edward Lear.

NYC streets are crackling rhythm and rhyme. You dance-walk eurhythmic alphabetized avenues and the streets are numbered in ¾ time. Its Claude Levi-Straus time in the city. Mythic proportions of soul power possess esoteric gatherings of the people who are darker than blue and whenever I’ve found myself privileged to flirt to the music made I have found myself all the better off for it later.

Very rewarding research in what’s common to our discriminating cultures. At the Cobra Club in the McIntire building on 18^th St, where C & K and sometimes I live, it goes on to dawn Thursday thru Sunday nights after 11. So’s we don’t call the cops we’ neighbors have free admission and open tab. We are trying very hard to behave ourselves. The scene’s too good to be true: cassette-player salsa rock, dresses that cling to some of the peachiest ass I’ve seen in the city. Those art schooled rock chicks certainly look sad by comparison.