Michael Gottlieb
Selections from Collected Memoirs
from THE EMPIRE CITY, 70s - 80s
1. A Democratic People's Republic
I look down at the copy of Howl I hold in my hand and recall the spring I bought it.
I was finishing my freshman year at Union College, the one full year I spent there before decamping to Bennington. And one thing I knew was that I didn't want to get drafted. Nixon was about to get rid of the student deferment, or maybe he'd already done just that. I remember the night earlier in that year, the night of the first draft lottery, when they read off the numbers and the birthdays. The first day of the year they picked, picked at random, was number one. The second day, whatever month and day it was, was number two. I would definitely have been called up if I hadn't still been in school. If you had a student deferment, your 2-S, that’s what it was called, was good until graduation. My number, rather the number for my birthday, June 29th, turned out to be in the low 100s, a hundred-twenty-something, a hundred-thirty-something.
I was a dead man, without my deferment. I would have been snatched up in a second by the Army if I hadn't been in school. They were taking guys up into the one-fifties, or maybe two-hundred. I remember walking the campus that night. Radios spilled it all out from open windows. General Hershey that bastard, or whoever it, was reading out the numbers and the birthdays. With every birthday cries of terror and despond, and relief, coursed from the dormitories. Young men hearing their fate.
I didn't want to go but I wasn't sure what to do. One weekend in New York I went down to the War Resisters League on Lafayette, desultorily studied their literature and listened to some overweight guy with a straggly beard lay out my options. I was already intimately familiar with every single one. And I had done my share of marching, or so I thought, marches in New York, a few others. Then down to Washington for a Mobilization, where I was thrilled to be able to throw a rock or two in the general direction of the DC police and get tear gassed in Dupont Circle at a ragtag, underpopulated SDS demo.
And, the following spring, we occupied the ROTC building on the Union campus, a perfectly charming old Greek Revival house we proceeded to treat rather shabbily. That earned us, all of us there at Union, the greatest sobriquet of all. For, the next day, during a press conference, Nixon was asked what he thought of the various student malefactors around the country, referencing us by example, since we'd also just happened to have burned him in effigy the previous evening – it did seem like the least we could do at the time – along with the demonstrators at Kent State, where there hadn't yet been any shooting. In response Nixon famously called us all "bums." That was beautiful, that was wondrous, but it helped me not at all.
So, late that term I found myself meeting with the wan college chaplain discussing the various options I might explore if I wished to be classified as conscientious objector, none of them particularly promising. At the time it seemed altogether unlikely that a draft board would accept anyone's heartfelt asseverations of committed non-violence unless one was the product of four generations of the Society of Friends.
Nevertheless, I was resolved to do what I could. Something, anything. Maybe I could build a case, somehow, to convince a board in three or four years that I really could be a true and decent C.O. The good parson told me about a program sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, an old and honorable Quaker group, we would call it an NGO nowadays, that had, in its day, supplied the ambulances that Hemingway and Stein had driven during World War I.
These days, among its other activities it participated in a so-called international student work camp program. They sponsored and sent American college students overseas for a few weeks each summer. The students lent a hand with a variety of public service projects in Africa or Asia or Latin America or Europe. The work consisted of Peace Corps-esque well-digging, education programs and the like. Of course, sponsorship didn't extend to paying the way. So, the students in question, or more often, the student-in-question's parents, were obliged to cough up a few thousand dollars. The brochure described adventure and altruism-driven satisfaction on five, or perhaps it was four, continents. Among those continents, Europe looked the most interesting to me. After all, if I was going to be doing good, I might as well be doing it somewhere where I might have a good time.
It ended up being a glorious summer. I hitchhiked across Europe, through France and Britain, hung out in Paris a couple of times, haunted London, ate amazing food and drank wonderful wine in France; and terrific beer and ale in Czechoslovakia and England. I met lots of fascinating and exotic Swiss and Danes and Frenchmen and hashish-dealing-Belgians, along with terrifyingly professional, middle-aged East German 'students,' unctuous British steam ship stewards, and sharp toed skin heads and softhearted Parisian flics. Best of all, I was fortunate enough, as the saying goes, to encounter all manner of spectacular English and French and Finnish and Swedish and Czech young women – and I owed it all to the Vietnam War and the Selective Service System and the American Friends Service Committee.
It was customary to participate in two camps each summer, and I ended up attending one in France and another in Czechoslovakia. I had a terrific time at both, met lots people, got a nicely in-depth picture of each country and engaged in some honest, if pointless, physical labor. The camp in France was located in the Bas Pyrenees and the twenty-odd of us were tasked with extending, by hand, a water line from the national highway that ran along the nearby ridge, down to a village which had no running water at all. In three weeks of digging, we managed to extend the line a few dozen yards, a distance that a back hoe could have dug up in a matter of an hour or two. But that wasn't the point. The point was that we had all gathered there from the four corners of the globe to help those folks. I remember we also helped them out with their haying. They seemed more appreciative for that assistance. After each day of stacking bales up into their hay ricks they'd stuff us full of sausage and red wine. They'd clearly long ago figured out how to live well enough without running water.
In Czechoslovakia the situation was different. The national organizing committee, the country-level entity that was the local equivalent of the AFSC, an innocuously dubbed peace and friendship committee, a product of the Dubcek-era – we were given to understand, now, two summers after the Red Army had rolled into the country, stifled the so-called Prague Spring, and reinstalled the local Stalinists – was itself going to be eliminated. This was the last summer this program would be run. I guess I was surprised that it hadn't been shut down earlier. While one might have assumed that the anti-war, pacifist leanings of the various organizations that had sent us there might have seemed useful to the new Brezhnevite rulers of the country, no doubt the headache of having to deal with all these demanding, free-thinking western college kids, and the damage they could do, with their rock and roll music, their blue jeans and so on, had clearly been deemed more trouble than it was worth.
At our camp we were building, or extending rather, a stout wooden stockade fence around the perimeter of the grounds of a hospital for children with severe learning disabilities. It was housed in a former aristocratic hunting lodge in a wood about sixty miles from Prague. We slept in an empty house in an oddly deserted agricultural collective, all bare whitewashed walls and empty lanes, about two miles away. We walked to the hospital along a country road, across the open fields, back and forth every day.
The girls slept in one room, the boys in another. We shared the single bathroom. There was a rude tavern in the ground floor of another home in the collective, where after work we would buy beer and cigarettes, Partizankas they were called, named after the anti-Nazi guerillas, from a stolid barkeep. Otherwise, we had no contact with any Czechs, except for the kids in the hospital, and the nuns that watched over them, with the exception of the four Czech students who led the camp.
They were two medical students. And then there were their two girlfriends. It didn't occur to me for some time to wonder what kind of risks they might be taking by associating themselves with this sort of enterprise. They were smart and sweet and seemed tough and eloquent and, it seemed to me then, entirely alive to the grimness of their situation, and what they, individually and collectively, had for a moment possessed: that heady freedom and sense of possibility. But there, in their country, it was expressed, denominated, so qualitatively differently. There, behind the Iron Curtain in the spring and summer of 1968 the change that had been tantalizingly close had no theoretical, utopian or millenarian dimension to it, at least compared to what had gone on in the streets of Paris. It represented a specific alteration in governance. It was a real revolution. But they knew that was all over and gone. And what they had in store for themselves was a long, cold winter.
We talked long into the night and we shared the poetry I'd brought with me. Although, I am ashamed to say, it didn't occur to me to leave any of those City Lights editions with them, like this copy of Howl. When the camp was over, we vowed to stay in touch, and exchanged addresses. In fact, for a couple of years we did write to each other; but I grew increasingly concerned that I be compromising them by maintaining a correspondence. I gradually slowed and then stopped writing back at all.
Although, again, it didn't occur to me that they could have cut it off at any time if they felt it dangerous. And so, what did I do? Cut them off from one last avenue to the West? Or am I overestimating my impact on their lives?
In any event, one night, back in our rooms, I fell into conversation with one of the young Czechs and the talk ventured, as it did surprisingly rarely, into the realm of politics. I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, though it shouldn't have been hard, since it was a topic on our minds all the time. The War.
For some reason I ended up telling him where I stood. Maybe I was asked; perhaps for some reason I felt obliged to unburden myself. And it all came out: how the South Vietnamese were the puppets of American imperialism, how the US was committing war crimes upon a poor defenseless country, how the NLF and the North Vietnamese were the authentic embodiment of the eternal, unquenchable spirit of the Vietnamese people and how, to support their heroic struggle against Yankee hegemony, all right-thinking people should do whatever they could to hasten the NLF's, or maybe by then it was the PRG's, victory. I trotted it all out and maybe I even believed it.
"You, my friend, you are very smart and you are very nice, but you simply don't know what you are talking about," is what my Czech friend said, in a not unkindly tone.
"We, and all of our friends, and everyone we know, want you Americans to win that war. You have to win the war. You must. You don't know what these people are like. We do." And that is all he said. And that, really, was the end of the conversation. For some reason I didn't have the presence of mind to offer up the proper line, that is, to argue that the Soviet and the American regimes were two sides of the same coin which, I knew, was a position that many of those who I would have called my peers had taken. For some reason I just couldn't think of anything to say.
I think perhaps one reason I stayed silent was that I realized he might just be right. Perhaps I really didn't know what I was talking about. And so, the conversation ended. I had nothing else to say. What could any of us say to him? None of us were facing what he was facing. And then the camp ended and I left.
Eventually, in due time, after some requisite jaunts across France and England, the summer came to a close. I packed my rucksack for the last time, climbed on another Icelandic Air 707 and returned to New York. And, although the big marches had ended, there was still plenty of action going on if one was looking to keep busy. I did go off to art school at the end of that year. One way or another, I didn't do any more marching. I'm not sure why. My politics, my professed politics, at least consciously, hadn't changed a whit. Eventually it became clear that the war was indeed winding down. By the time I graduated, three years later, they weren't drafting anyone with a number higher than thirty or fifty.
I, for one, was safe and I didn't have to think too often about that summer's conversations.
10. Some Other Furniture
Besides my table there wasn't really much other furniture I could claim to own back then. There was the dinette set that sat outside the kitchen in my apartment in Chelsea, in the former dentist’s office waiting room. It was a high Fifties piece, the table done up in flecked Formica set upon highly worked black cast iron legs. Its four chairs had similarly intricate cast-iron work with pleated and tufted Naugahyde cushions. It was in pristine condition and remained so for as long as I owned it, since it never got much use. It was terrifically inappropriate and wildly out of keepiong with every other stick of furniture that I possessed.
When it came to furnishing that apartment on 19th Street, straitened circumstances dictated very economical measures. I paid next to nothing, as in the case of the desk built for me, or nothing at all, which is how the dinette set, and a pile of silverware came to me. I had an aunt, Rae, one of my mother's many sisters and her husband, Al. When I was growing up, they lived just a few minutes away, and so we saw them constantly. They had a business down in Soho. It was a body and fender shop on the corner of Mercer and Houston. They also ran an adjoining parking lot that ran along the south side of the street, all the way to Greene.
The parking lot was one of a long strip of empty lots along Houston, from Sixth Avenue, all the way east. Houston had been widened and those lots leveled back in the Twenties, when the IND subway line had been dug. The big playground at Avenue of the Americas is where the trains turn the corner and head up to West Fourth Street, their next stop. Sitting in the office of my aunt and uncle's shop you could hear and feel the trains shudder by every few minutes. There had never been enough economic activity in that part of town to make it worth building on those narrow lots, and so there were parking lots from the East Side to the West, with a few gas stations near Broadway that catered to cabbies. One of them had a carwash that came to play a starring role in a poem I later wrote. All along Houston you could still see the naked sides of buildings, ones that faced the side streets, Mercer, Greene, Wooster, Thompson, Macdougal. They weren't meant to be seen. All of their neighbors to the north had been torn down decades ago. The city had condemned all this land by eminent domain and owned it still.
My parents having already retired down to Florida, during my first years in New York I spent many an odd hour lounging in Rae and Al’s office, watching and listening to the neighborhood characters who drifted in and out. The tired old manufacturers reps and salesmen with their stained ties, wheezy Dodges and their ancient jokes. The sleek new artists in their knit pullovers and shiny Saabs, their tight smiles and impatient glances.
If I appeared particularly peckish, Rae would take me over to Food. She liked it there. The trays reminded me of a cafeteria but I was in no position to complain. It meant I was sure to get at least one decent meal that day. Now and then, when it came time to close up shop, Rae and Al would treat me to dinner, to Ratner's, back then there were two Ratners, or the Rifle Club, that Italian restaurant on Macdougal.
By the 1980s the body and fender shop had shut down and the modest, one story building it had been housed in became for a short time a very hot disco. My aunt and uncle ran the next-door parking lot for a few more years, out of a trailer they parked by the sidewalk.
But back when I got that first apartment on 19th Street Rae took me in hand, clearly, I needed help. One afternoon we got in her Cadillac and drove up to the Bronx. Two of her old friends were retiring, to Florida of course, and were getting rid of stuff. There might be something of interest for me. I vaguely knew this couple. He was a cop, one of those Jewish New York City policemen of which there used to be more than a few. In fact, all his brothers were cops too. He was the star among them, a big, strapping handsome man, he'd been picked for dignitary protection assignments as a young man. The department always wanted good looking faces accompanying visiting potentates and politicians when their pictures appeared in the papers. Eventually he rose in the ranks and commanded the motorcycle precinct located along lower reaches of the Bronx River Parkway, then served at the Police Academy and retired as a captain.
We pulled up to a trim house in Riverdale and his wife greeted us. A dark-haired young girl, a daughter, was introduced. She couldn't have been more than fifteen. She had a friend over and I have a memory of the two of them scampering, giggling, up the stairs. A lot of stuff was headed to the curb, but all I really wanted, or needed, was that dinette set. I don't remember how we got it downtown, it couldn’t have fit in the back of my aunt’s Seville; along with some silverware. It was everyday stuff, stainless steel flatware, nothing special, but I was grateful for it. I was loaded down with as much of it as I could take, spoons, forks, knives, scooped into a paper bag and shoved in my arms.
Three or four years later I ran into that girl again, at Rae and Al’s trailer. She was in college now, down in Florida, and visiting New York to see that girlfriend that she'd run upstairs with. I took her out and bought her a glass of wine on West Broadway, at the Ballroom. She told me about her plans. She and her friend were headed to California for the summer. A few years later I ran into her again. By now she had graduated from college and was in New York looking for a job in the movie business. Since I was working at Warner’s at the time, my aunt thought I could be of assistance to her. She arranged for us all to go to Ratner's one evening. This girl had turned into a woman. Naturally I volunteered to help her in any way that I could. I asked her out a week or two later.
Then the time came for her to come to my apartment. By then I was living in Little Italy again, on Kenmare Street. That apartment on 19th Street was way in the past, as was the one after that. I was making her some dinner, and she volunteered to set the table. The dinette set was long gone by then. The only table that could fit in that shoebox of an apartment was the old desk that Steve had made for me. As she picked the first fork out of the drawer Robin gave out a little cry, and let forth with another with each additional spoon and knife.
This was the silverware from her childhood, which she hadn't seen in years, had entirely forgotten about, and now here it lay, in her hand. To me the seven or eight years since I had been to her old house passed quickly – one or two jobs, one or two apartments, but to her it represented a vast expanse of time that she had journeyed across, from childhood to adulthood. And here it was, all brought back to her in the form of some battered flatware.
I haven't looked recently but I don't think that silver is around anymore. I should ask her. It's been almost thirty years. A few other sets have been picked up along the way. We’re married, you see. Some of what now sits in our drawers is surely laden with as much emotional freight, at least I think so. I want to believe our children will react similarly should they eventually, in turn, in their own time, happen to come across those forks and spoons at some point, years from now.
15. The Late Imperial Precincts
One day towards the end of 1976 or the beginning of 1977 Alan Davies said to me, "I'd like to do a book of yours."
By now I was writing longer poems, pieces made up often several sections, and producing collage illustrations for their covers, xeroxing them and sending them around to my pals. Eventually I realized that no one else was sharing their poems before they were published.
But was easy to plan this book. Like the rest of the work that followed for years, the two poems in this book had a subtext grounded in New York City itself and so, at Alan's suggestion, with his encouragement, I went around the city taking photographs – the Morton Street apartment hadn't been robbed yet, I still had the cameras my father had given me as a kid – and also assembled new collages from stuff I found on the street, coming up with enough eventually so that each of the sections of the two works had an illustration facing it.
The city back then, so mysterious, impermeable. An impenetrable locus of hidden doings, serene, awesome in its ability to ignore. Its decay seemed regnant. And inevitable. There was no doubt that New York's great days were behind it. There was security in the knowledge that we were living among faded grandeur, that the theme was decline, that so much of this might be rubble soon. Some empire's capital, after it's been sacked. Matta-Clark was showing us, wasn’t he?
When it came to this too, we were so wrong. And the swelling, apparently unstoppable revival – though revival is not the word that those who have been priced out of those neighborhoods would likely use – that has long since spread to Brooklyn and the Bronx, makes those early days seem even further off, impossibly long ago.
The myriad worlds within the metropolis back then, each existed in parallel, independent of the other. Coterminous yet never touching, except at that one surface point: the street. There they deigned to let you peer at them. The world city, a new Paris. When, a few years later, in Superman II or III, Warner Bros. decided to place Lex Luthor's hideout in a hitherto-unknown concourse below Grand Central, it seemed obvious and easy. Of course, there were huge, abandoned train stations beneath our feet all over Manhattan. There had to be. This place was an endlessly arresting scrim. And all manner of dramas, from rewritings of Nadja to revivals of Fantomas, were surely being played out across it, beneath it, above it. If only it was possible to penetrate into those other worlds.
After I assembled all the illustrations, Alan and I went to work. The transformation of the rough typed pages along with the photos and pasted-together collages into a bound work seemed, as it surely does for everyone working on a first book, nothing less than miraculous. We worked with a pair of cheerily knowing lesbian typesetters. One of them adorned herself with radically sculpted eyebrows, a neat pageboy å la Louise Brooks, and extremely original makeup including large pastel-hued discs of pancake on either cheek. They were ensconced in a vast, dingy, echoing loft on Lafayette Street. Taking up a full corner of their space was a gigantic typesetting computer. The most advanced, the latest, the most up-to-date, we were assured. No doubt it had less computing power – as they say now about the Apollo capsules – than today's cheapest phone. It spit out thin strips of damp copy, reeking toxically, like enlargements fresh from the darkroom, one laborious page after another.
I'm not sure how many other perfect-bound books Alan had published by that time. Certainly, he had done magazines. A Hundred Posters was still getting turned out with an estimable consistency. It would continue issue after issue, for several more years. Nevertheless, he guided the process with a confident hand, as if he had been doing this for decades.
This is the way it went with Alan: he asked me if I had any ideas for the cover. In fact, I had. A couple of years earlier, I had spent a lot time at the Queens Museum, a rather sad building that had been used for both of the World's Fairs. It was one of the sites to which Learning to Read Through the Arts had expanded. In a half-abandoned storage room there, I came across piles of glossy brochures Robert Moses had printed up to promote the 1960 fair’s New York State pavilion. Across the front and back cover was a wonderful photo of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, under construction. In the foreground the Brooklyn approach ramps were already laid in and paved. The towers and the cables were already in place. Just one section of deck had been installed so far, though, in the center of the span, like a gigantic hyphen in the sky. It seemed to go so well with the photographs of the aerial walkways in the book itself.
My conscience was fairly clear when it comes to the means by which I had acquired my three or four copies of this brochure. I had essentially stolen them, certainly, but there had been piles and piles of them, stacked haphazardly in a sad neglected corner of a sad neglected museum. A museum so reduced in ignominy that it had to share its building with a skating rink. A museum whose principal attraction back then was a sprawling scale model of the city which hadn't been updated since the Fair opened, almost 20 years earlier. These brochures were just waiting for the day when they’d be consigned to the dumpster.
My concern back then was that we were going to use that cover without permission. As I recall there was no copyright page in that brochure, and no credits listed either, of any sort. I want to say that Robert Moses's name or likeness appeared on almost every page. While he was certainly good and dead by then, my then-hazy understanding of intellectual property law told me that what we were doing could conceivably get us in some sort of trouble. What kind of trouble, I wasn't sure but it seemed dicey. Part of me said that this was just poetry, just a poetry book that only a few people, a few hundred tops, would ever see. And no one cared about poetry anyway. But part of me was worried.
Alan took care of that problem in the same way that he dealt with every other issue, each of the inevitable glitches or apparent crises that arose while we worked on this book. He radiated calmness. He told me not to worry. So, I didn't. It was that unshakeable, imperturbable confidence, combined with his unfailing solicitude, continually seeking to ensure that my wishes when it came to the book were fulfilled, even more than the fact that this was my first book, which made this particular experience so wonderful. Each stage of the book's production thus turned into an occasion for pleasure: proofing the first set-up bits of copy the typesetters handed to us, reviewing the pasted-up boards, checking the blues. Because this was years and years before any of us acquired a personal computer, and anyone could produce justified text in any leading or font imaginable. That transformation, from smudgy typescript, itself just one step away from the handwritten sheet, to the bound book, was nothing less than amazing, a miracle in its way. And because Alan had everything so well in hand, this became, as it always should be for a first-time author, an adventure of unalloyed joy.
35. Cap Toes from Brooks Brothers
I was on the B train, heading uptown. It was the middle of the day and the car was empty. I had just started at Warner Bros. so the suits and blazers which eventually comprised my wardrobe hadn't yet taken over my closet. I remember what I was wearing: a pair of button-fly Levis, a striped Brooks Brothers button-down shirt and one of the cast-off, vintage, that is to say, used sport jackets. which in most cases were in fact parts of old suits, which I'd picked up on Lower Broadway. Plus, a pair of cap toe Brooks Brothers oxfords. I had two pairs of them, one black, one brown. Not wingtips, those were even more expensive. These were the restrained cap toes with that single, discreet band of decoration across the toe box. As the messenger for the Story Department at Warner’s I could see, because I got around town quite a bit those days, that I certainly wasn't the best dressed messenger in the industry, but I was holding my own. These were the standard elements of my get-up and with one exception, they all comported with my station in life. That is, neither the jacket nor the pants nor the shirt by themselves, when it came to the pathetically paltry salary I took home every two weeks, broke the bank.
Then there were those shoes. They seemed astronomically expensive at the time, And not just then. Now, decades later, I wouldn't dream of walking into Brooks Brothers, or its equivalent, and plunking down for a pair of shoes a sum equal to, adjusted for inflation, what each of them had set me back. But I was single, and when it came to the sumptuary laws I deigned to recognize, I had definite and unwavering opinions. As a longtime subscriber to Interview magazine, I knew that Andy typically attired himself similarly, though I’m not sure that was a significant driver for me.
I'd spent more on those shoes than any other single purchase I'd ever made, save my rent, and there it was a very close call as to which called for a bigger check to be written, with the possible exception of the Borsalino fedora purchased around that time at Paul Stuart.
So, imagine my surprise when, in that nearly empty B train, on its way to its terminus at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, out of the blue there appeared a well-dressed gent in his 60s sitting himself down on the same long longitudinal bench I was occupying. As I recall, he was wearing a very presentable suit, a gray pinstripe or a heather, along with a very richly complex silk tie, Hermès perhaps, and, to round it off, a suitably expensive-looking and appropriately battered Hartmann briefcase, entirely in keeping, all of a piece. But what drew my attention were his shoes.
I could not take my eyes off them.
They were remarkable. They were magnificent. They were simply splendid. I had never seen anything like them in my life. Just looking at them, simply having the opportunity to clap eyes upon them was, I realized in a flash, a life lesson in itself. And, the amazing thing was, he was wearing precisely the same shoes as me.
All the while I was goggling at this man's footwear, I was thinking about the evening in front of me, for some reason. Those thoughts were uppermost in my mind and have remained, bound up with the rest of the memories of this moment. There was some reading scheduled for that night and it was going to be down in Soho. Or maybe it wasn't a reading, maybe it was a concert. We were all going to see a lot of John Zorn around then. Bruce had turned us on to him. In any event, we were all going to be down there that night and my thoughts were tending to which place, for certainly it was going to have to be decided among us, we’d end up having dinner at afterwards. And I remember remarking to myself, at the very same time as I took in that amazing pair of shoes, that in all likelihood we were all going to end up at the Prince Street Bar, a joint for which I had developed a particular detestation.
Someone did have an affinity for that place, maybe it was Bruce, maybe it was Charles, perhaps it was someone else entirely. In fact, the restaurant was, for our purposes, entirely serviceable: the beer was reasonable, the burgers were big. The source of my resentment at least for that night was that we were going to end up in such a patently gauche place the likes of which, if I had my druthers, I would never have been caught dead in. The fact is, of course, that the Prince Street Bar itself is long gone, replaced decades ago, first by a series of dismayingly expensive French shoe stores, then by a succession of progressively down-market designer jean emporia.
The Prince Street Bar disappeared off this earth so long ago that certainly there must be middle-aged, indeed, aging, veritably aging, New Yorkers who fondly look back upon their salad years, when they were young and thin and poor, for whom recollections of the Prince Street Bar forever evoke comforting and warm memories.
For me, there was One University, which I was frequenting around then. It certainly seemed like it was going to become a permanent New York fixture. But how many people now remember Mickey Ruskin, who owned it, and who for some unfathomable, inscrutable reason deigned to let me and Alan and others who I would show up with, past the bar into the dining room area, that exclusive, well-lit, roped-off dining room? Why us of all people?
Max's, which had been his place too, was long gone by then. In addition to its role as a Warhol hangout, and a downtown music venue, Max's Kansas City had served as a Bennington rally-point in New York. And then there was the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on Chambers, which he seemed to have open for a few weeks only before he moved up to University Place. We made it there just a few times. It was expensive too. The last time: Talking Heads were playing, and Andy was at a table nearby, with Fran Lebowitz. But that was gone already as well. Long gone. Andy was someone you saw all over town. At openings, at parties, in espresso shops in Little Italy, at Ballato's on Houston St. So, there I was on the train, thinking those thoughts. I who had been in New York all of perhaps six or seven years, and had read my Proust, and thought I had that whole remembering-or-trying-to-remember, and understand, your-past, that whole thing, well in hand.
Then I looked up from my neighbor's footwear, took a look at his face and realized that I was sitting by John Vliet Lindsay. It had only been ten years or so since he had been mayor, or so it seemed. since he had been done down by Mike Quill, the transit union boss who brought the city to its knees. Now an MTA garage uptown has been named after Quill and half the buses cruising streets of Manhattan have decals plastered on them trumpeting his name. But John Lindsay, who some used to credit for keeping New York from going up in flames during those hot summers of rebellion in the Sixties, when almost every other American city was burning; who seemed, at least to several newspaper writers at the time, have the makings to be another Kennedy – young, aristocratic, an embodiment of the future, our future – there's nothing in this city bearing his name. He was just sitting there, unheralded, unacknowledged, unrecognized, on the uptown B train.
The sight of this man wearing the same dress shoes as I was wearing, as I'd seen Andy wearing too, as I gazed down at his oxfords, threw me for a loop. The thing was, Lindsay's shoes, though they were the same model, and looked actually to be the same size, and doubtlessly were bought in the same department in the same Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue, were entirely different from mine or Andy's. His pair had never, and this was indubitably clear, had never once been shined or polished or come within fifty furlongs of a shoe brush. They were stupefying. They were fantastically cracked and dried out and peeling. They resembled nothing so much as some three-dimensional, magisterial apotheosis of desertification, an object lesson of some sort, demonstrating to some hapless audience the price of inattention or irresponsibility or the wastrel life or something similar. They were fantastically ruined. They looked like Auden's face, but, if possible, worse.
I had never seen anything like them. And, glancing back up at the immaculately groomed Wall Street lawyer, for that was the life Lindsay had assumed after retiring from public office, in his irreproachable suit, I realized this was, indeed, after all, just a studied indifference. He was making a point. He had probably been buying just these shoes since he was a sophomore at Harvard, unlike me, or Andy, who had come so late to them. In fact, his brothers and his father and all his uncles had no doubt been wearing them for time out of memory. And, indeed, his treatment of them was surely, to his mother or his sisters or his wife, not all that unusual. He no doubt went down to the store, bought several pairs, wore them to death and then, five or ten years later, when they were finally dead, dead, and dead, scooted back to the shoe department and picked up another half dozen pair.
At this point that I remembered that Lindsay was a twin. Wasn’t his brother a Wall Street lawyer too? It didn’t matter, I decided.
A passage from a biography of T.E. Lawrence just then flashed through my mind. I must have read it back in high school. When he wasn't flying across the desert on a camel, Lawrence of Arabia made use of a Rolls Royce, according to this book. At that time, at the dawn of the auto age, those vehicles weren't only luxury rides for the rich but also, apparently, were sturdy enough to serve as staff cars for generals and such. Apparently, Lawrence flogged his Rollses, or Rollers, mercilessly, until they were ready for the junk heap. Then he would have them driven off a cliff and simply order up another one. It all seemed of a piece.
And these were the same shoes. We all were wearing the same shoes. And Andy and I were wearing them because... because of chance? Because of some sort of shared susceptibility to some larger sensibility? There were the shirts and the 501s and, yes, the shoes. But with Lindsay, it was different. I was certainly a part of the world that Warhol inhabited, though certainly only a tiny, insignificant part, but John Lindsay, he inhabited an entirely different world, light years away.
If I fell into a conversation with Andy what ever would I have to say? ‘I read Interview every month I have a tall pile on my shelf in the apartment. Bruce Andrews came by one day and tried to talk me into giving them all to him but I said, ‘No.’
Oh, that would go over really well.
And, of course, when it came to what Lindsay thought of Warhol, one can only conjecture. And yet, and yet, there we were: all dressed, at least from the ankles down, identically.
I wanted to believe, as I sat there on the B train, thinking of Andy, and all the places one ran into him, so many of them lost and gone already, and how it really wasn't so far-fetched after all, that I could run into this former mayor in the afternoon and maybe Andy this evening though certainly not at the Prince Street Bar, didn't it say something about this violent and decayed and vicious, yet somehow leveling, open – in some bizarre way – city, that we would all be so similarly shod?
But then, on the other hand, there was Lindsay's indifference to his footwear. Perhaps a studied, Episcopalian affect, but an indifference, a disregard, nonetheless. I would never have dreamed of treating my shoes, my most expensive possessions, so. I am sure Andy wouldn't have either. Maybe Peter Beard, but not Andy. So, was there some sort of message in Lindsay's oxfords? Some end-stage aristo gesture, some sort of insulting fillip that in all likelihood only another old St. Paul's or Buckley boy could decode?
I wasn't sure. The train pulled into 57th Street. We rose and I followed him out, impossibly tall and composed, the features weather-beaten yet still entirely aquiline, pushing through the turnstile, up the stairs to Sixth Avenue, to a part of Manhattan where not only do the skyscrapers create their own weather, setting up vicious windstorms on corners of their own choosing, but where they manufacture their own light too, an alternating, chilling shadow and black disorienting glare, into which, once my eyes finished adjusting, I saw he had disappeared.
from THE EMPIRE CITY, 70s - 80s
1. A Democratic People's Republic
I look down at the copy of Howl I hold in my hand and recall the spring I bought it.
I was finishing my freshman year at Union College, the one full year I spent there before decamping to Bennington. And one thing I knew was that I didn't want to get drafted. Nixon was about to get rid of the student deferment, or maybe he'd already done just that. I remember the night earlier in that year, the night of the first draft lottery, when they read off the numbers and the birthdays. The first day of the year they picked, picked at random, was number one. The second day, whatever month and day it was, was number two. I would definitely have been called up if I hadn't still been in school. If you had a student deferment, your 2-S, that’s what it was called, was good until graduation. My number, rather the number for my birthday, June 29th, turned out to be in the low 100s, a hundred-twenty-something, a hundred-thirty-something.
I was a dead man, without my deferment. I would have been snatched up in a second by the Army if I hadn't been in school. They were taking guys up into the one-fifties, or maybe two-hundred. I remember walking the campus that night. Radios spilled it all out from open windows. General Hershey that bastard, or whoever it, was reading out the numbers and the birthdays. With every birthday cries of terror and despond, and relief, coursed from the dormitories. Young men hearing their fate.
I didn't want to go but I wasn't sure what to do. One weekend in New York I went down to the War Resisters League on Lafayette, desultorily studied their literature and listened to some overweight guy with a straggly beard lay out my options. I was already intimately familiar with every single one. And I had done my share of marching, or so I thought, marches in New York, a few others. Then down to Washington for a Mobilization, where I was thrilled to be able to throw a rock or two in the general direction of the DC police and get tear gassed in Dupont Circle at a ragtag, underpopulated SDS demo.
And, the following spring, we occupied the ROTC building on the Union campus, a perfectly charming old Greek Revival house we proceeded to treat rather shabbily. That earned us, all of us there at Union, the greatest sobriquet of all. For, the next day, during a press conference, Nixon was asked what he thought of the various student malefactors around the country, referencing us by example, since we'd also just happened to have burned him in effigy the previous evening – it did seem like the least we could do at the time – along with the demonstrators at Kent State, where there hadn't yet been any shooting. In response Nixon famously called us all "bums." That was beautiful, that was wondrous, but it helped me not at all.
So, late that term I found myself meeting with the wan college chaplain discussing the various options I might explore if I wished to be classified as conscientious objector, none of them particularly promising. At the time it seemed altogether unlikely that a draft board would accept anyone's heartfelt asseverations of committed non-violence unless one was the product of four generations of the Society of Friends.
Nevertheless, I was resolved to do what I could. Something, anything. Maybe I could build a case, somehow, to convince a board in three or four years that I really could be a true and decent C.O. The good parson told me about a program sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, an old and honorable Quaker group, we would call it an NGO nowadays, that had, in its day, supplied the ambulances that Hemingway and Stein had driven during World War I.
These days, among its other activities it participated in a so-called international student work camp program. They sponsored and sent American college students overseas for a few weeks each summer. The students lent a hand with a variety of public service projects in Africa or Asia or Latin America or Europe. The work consisted of Peace Corps-esque well-digging, education programs and the like. Of course, sponsorship didn't extend to paying the way. So, the students in question, or more often, the student-in-question's parents, were obliged to cough up a few thousand dollars. The brochure described adventure and altruism-driven satisfaction on five, or perhaps it was four, continents. Among those continents, Europe looked the most interesting to me. After all, if I was going to be doing good, I might as well be doing it somewhere where I might have a good time.
It ended up being a glorious summer. I hitchhiked across Europe, through France and Britain, hung out in Paris a couple of times, haunted London, ate amazing food and drank wonderful wine in France; and terrific beer and ale in Czechoslovakia and England. I met lots of fascinating and exotic Swiss and Danes and Frenchmen and hashish-dealing-Belgians, along with terrifyingly professional, middle-aged East German 'students,' unctuous British steam ship stewards, and sharp toed skin heads and softhearted Parisian flics. Best of all, I was fortunate enough, as the saying goes, to encounter all manner of spectacular English and French and Finnish and Swedish and Czech young women – and I owed it all to the Vietnam War and the Selective Service System and the American Friends Service Committee.
It was customary to participate in two camps each summer, and I ended up attending one in France and another in Czechoslovakia. I had a terrific time at both, met lots people, got a nicely in-depth picture of each country and engaged in some honest, if pointless, physical labor. The camp in France was located in the Bas Pyrenees and the twenty-odd of us were tasked with extending, by hand, a water line from the national highway that ran along the nearby ridge, down to a village which had no running water at all. In three weeks of digging, we managed to extend the line a few dozen yards, a distance that a back hoe could have dug up in a matter of an hour or two. But that wasn't the point. The point was that we had all gathered there from the four corners of the globe to help those folks. I remember we also helped them out with their haying. They seemed more appreciative for that assistance. After each day of stacking bales up into their hay ricks they'd stuff us full of sausage and red wine. They'd clearly long ago figured out how to live well enough without running water.
In Czechoslovakia the situation was different. The national organizing committee, the country-level entity that was the local equivalent of the AFSC, an innocuously dubbed peace and friendship committee, a product of the Dubcek-era – we were given to understand, now, two summers after the Red Army had rolled into the country, stifled the so-called Prague Spring, and reinstalled the local Stalinists – was itself going to be eliminated. This was the last summer this program would be run. I guess I was surprised that it hadn't been shut down earlier. While one might have assumed that the anti-war, pacifist leanings of the various organizations that had sent us there might have seemed useful to the new Brezhnevite rulers of the country, no doubt the headache of having to deal with all these demanding, free-thinking western college kids, and the damage they could do, with their rock and roll music, their blue jeans and so on, had clearly been deemed more trouble than it was worth.
At our camp we were building, or extending rather, a stout wooden stockade fence around the perimeter of the grounds of a hospital for children with severe learning disabilities. It was housed in a former aristocratic hunting lodge in a wood about sixty miles from Prague. We slept in an empty house in an oddly deserted agricultural collective, all bare whitewashed walls and empty lanes, about two miles away. We walked to the hospital along a country road, across the open fields, back and forth every day.
The girls slept in one room, the boys in another. We shared the single bathroom. There was a rude tavern in the ground floor of another home in the collective, where after work we would buy beer and cigarettes, Partizankas they were called, named after the anti-Nazi guerillas, from a stolid barkeep. Otherwise, we had no contact with any Czechs, except for the kids in the hospital, and the nuns that watched over them, with the exception of the four Czech students who led the camp.
They were two medical students. And then there were their two girlfriends. It didn't occur to me for some time to wonder what kind of risks they might be taking by associating themselves with this sort of enterprise. They were smart and sweet and seemed tough and eloquent and, it seemed to me then, entirely alive to the grimness of their situation, and what they, individually and collectively, had for a moment possessed: that heady freedom and sense of possibility. But there, in their country, it was expressed, denominated, so qualitatively differently. There, behind the Iron Curtain in the spring and summer of 1968 the change that had been tantalizingly close had no theoretical, utopian or millenarian dimension to it, at least compared to what had gone on in the streets of Paris. It represented a specific alteration in governance. It was a real revolution. But they knew that was all over and gone. And what they had in store for themselves was a long, cold winter.
We talked long into the night and we shared the poetry I'd brought with me. Although, I am ashamed to say, it didn't occur to me to leave any of those City Lights editions with them, like this copy of Howl. When the camp was over, we vowed to stay in touch, and exchanged addresses. In fact, for a couple of years we did write to each other; but I grew increasingly concerned that I be compromising them by maintaining a correspondence. I gradually slowed and then stopped writing back at all.
Although, again, it didn't occur to me that they could have cut it off at any time if they felt it dangerous. And so, what did I do? Cut them off from one last avenue to the West? Or am I overestimating my impact on their lives?
In any event, one night, back in our rooms, I fell into conversation with one of the young Czechs and the talk ventured, as it did surprisingly rarely, into the realm of politics. I'm not sure how we got onto the topic, though it shouldn't have been hard, since it was a topic on our minds all the time. The War.
For some reason I ended up telling him where I stood. Maybe I was asked; perhaps for some reason I felt obliged to unburden myself. And it all came out: how the South Vietnamese were the puppets of American imperialism, how the US was committing war crimes upon a poor defenseless country, how the NLF and the North Vietnamese were the authentic embodiment of the eternal, unquenchable spirit of the Vietnamese people and how, to support their heroic struggle against Yankee hegemony, all right-thinking people should do whatever they could to hasten the NLF's, or maybe by then it was the PRG's, victory. I trotted it all out and maybe I even believed it.
"You, my friend, you are very smart and you are very nice, but you simply don't know what you are talking about," is what my Czech friend said, in a not unkindly tone.
"We, and all of our friends, and everyone we know, want you Americans to win that war. You have to win the war. You must. You don't know what these people are like. We do." And that is all he said. And that, really, was the end of the conversation. For some reason I didn't have the presence of mind to offer up the proper line, that is, to argue that the Soviet and the American regimes were two sides of the same coin which, I knew, was a position that many of those who I would have called my peers had taken. For some reason I just couldn't think of anything to say.
I think perhaps one reason I stayed silent was that I realized he might just be right. Perhaps I really didn't know what I was talking about. And so, the conversation ended. I had nothing else to say. What could any of us say to him? None of us were facing what he was facing. And then the camp ended and I left.
Eventually, in due time, after some requisite jaunts across France and England, the summer came to a close. I packed my rucksack for the last time, climbed on another Icelandic Air 707 and returned to New York. And, although the big marches had ended, there was still plenty of action going on if one was looking to keep busy. I did go off to art school at the end of that year. One way or another, I didn't do any more marching. I'm not sure why. My politics, my professed politics, at least consciously, hadn't changed a whit. Eventually it became clear that the war was indeed winding down. By the time I graduated, three years later, they weren't drafting anyone with a number higher than thirty or fifty.
I, for one, was safe and I didn't have to think too often about that summer's conversations.
10. Some Other Furniture
Besides my table there wasn't really much other furniture I could claim to own back then. There was the dinette set that sat outside the kitchen in my apartment in Chelsea, in the former dentist’s office waiting room. It was a high Fifties piece, the table done up in flecked Formica set upon highly worked black cast iron legs. Its four chairs had similarly intricate cast-iron work with pleated and tufted Naugahyde cushions. It was in pristine condition and remained so for as long as I owned it, since it never got much use. It was terrifically inappropriate and wildly out of keepiong with every other stick of furniture that I possessed.
When it came to furnishing that apartment on 19th Street, straitened circumstances dictated very economical measures. I paid next to nothing, as in the case of the desk built for me, or nothing at all, which is how the dinette set, and a pile of silverware came to me. I had an aunt, Rae, one of my mother's many sisters and her husband, Al. When I was growing up, they lived just a few minutes away, and so we saw them constantly. They had a business down in Soho. It was a body and fender shop on the corner of Mercer and Houston. They also ran an adjoining parking lot that ran along the south side of the street, all the way to Greene.
The parking lot was one of a long strip of empty lots along Houston, from Sixth Avenue, all the way east. Houston had been widened and those lots leveled back in the Twenties, when the IND subway line had been dug. The big playground at Avenue of the Americas is where the trains turn the corner and head up to West Fourth Street, their next stop. Sitting in the office of my aunt and uncle's shop you could hear and feel the trains shudder by every few minutes. There had never been enough economic activity in that part of town to make it worth building on those narrow lots, and so there were parking lots from the East Side to the West, with a few gas stations near Broadway that catered to cabbies. One of them had a carwash that came to play a starring role in a poem I later wrote. All along Houston you could still see the naked sides of buildings, ones that faced the side streets, Mercer, Greene, Wooster, Thompson, Macdougal. They weren't meant to be seen. All of their neighbors to the north had been torn down decades ago. The city had condemned all this land by eminent domain and owned it still.
My parents having already retired down to Florida, during my first years in New York I spent many an odd hour lounging in Rae and Al’s office, watching and listening to the neighborhood characters who drifted in and out. The tired old manufacturers reps and salesmen with their stained ties, wheezy Dodges and their ancient jokes. The sleek new artists in their knit pullovers and shiny Saabs, their tight smiles and impatient glances.
If I appeared particularly peckish, Rae would take me over to Food. She liked it there. The trays reminded me of a cafeteria but I was in no position to complain. It meant I was sure to get at least one decent meal that day. Now and then, when it came time to close up shop, Rae and Al would treat me to dinner, to Ratner's, back then there were two Ratners, or the Rifle Club, that Italian restaurant on Macdougal.
By the 1980s the body and fender shop had shut down and the modest, one story building it had been housed in became for a short time a very hot disco. My aunt and uncle ran the next-door parking lot for a few more years, out of a trailer they parked by the sidewalk.
But back when I got that first apartment on 19th Street Rae took me in hand, clearly, I needed help. One afternoon we got in her Cadillac and drove up to the Bronx. Two of her old friends were retiring, to Florida of course, and were getting rid of stuff. There might be something of interest for me. I vaguely knew this couple. He was a cop, one of those Jewish New York City policemen of which there used to be more than a few. In fact, all his brothers were cops too. He was the star among them, a big, strapping handsome man, he'd been picked for dignitary protection assignments as a young man. The department always wanted good looking faces accompanying visiting potentates and politicians when their pictures appeared in the papers. Eventually he rose in the ranks and commanded the motorcycle precinct located along lower reaches of the Bronx River Parkway, then served at the Police Academy and retired as a captain.
We pulled up to a trim house in Riverdale and his wife greeted us. A dark-haired young girl, a daughter, was introduced. She couldn't have been more than fifteen. She had a friend over and I have a memory of the two of them scampering, giggling, up the stairs. A lot of stuff was headed to the curb, but all I really wanted, or needed, was that dinette set. I don't remember how we got it downtown, it couldn’t have fit in the back of my aunt’s Seville; along with some silverware. It was everyday stuff, stainless steel flatware, nothing special, but I was grateful for it. I was loaded down with as much of it as I could take, spoons, forks, knives, scooped into a paper bag and shoved in my arms.
Three or four years later I ran into that girl again, at Rae and Al’s trailer. She was in college now, down in Florida, and visiting New York to see that girlfriend that she'd run upstairs with. I took her out and bought her a glass of wine on West Broadway, at the Ballroom. She told me about her plans. She and her friend were headed to California for the summer. A few years later I ran into her again. By now she had graduated from college and was in New York looking for a job in the movie business. Since I was working at Warner’s at the time, my aunt thought I could be of assistance to her. She arranged for us all to go to Ratner's one evening. This girl had turned into a woman. Naturally I volunteered to help her in any way that I could. I asked her out a week or two later.
Then the time came for her to come to my apartment. By then I was living in Little Italy again, on Kenmare Street. That apartment on 19th Street was way in the past, as was the one after that. I was making her some dinner, and she volunteered to set the table. The dinette set was long gone by then. The only table that could fit in that shoebox of an apartment was the old desk that Steve had made for me. As she picked the first fork out of the drawer Robin gave out a little cry, and let forth with another with each additional spoon and knife.
This was the silverware from her childhood, which she hadn't seen in years, had entirely forgotten about, and now here it lay, in her hand. To me the seven or eight years since I had been to her old house passed quickly – one or two jobs, one or two apartments, but to her it represented a vast expanse of time that she had journeyed across, from childhood to adulthood. And here it was, all brought back to her in the form of some battered flatware.
I haven't looked recently but I don't think that silver is around anymore. I should ask her. It's been almost thirty years. A few other sets have been picked up along the way. We’re married, you see. Some of what now sits in our drawers is surely laden with as much emotional freight, at least I think so. I want to believe our children will react similarly should they eventually, in turn, in their own time, happen to come across those forks and spoons at some point, years from now.
15. The Late Imperial Precincts
One day towards the end of 1976 or the beginning of 1977 Alan Davies said to me, "I'd like to do a book of yours."
By now I was writing longer poems, pieces made up often several sections, and producing collage illustrations for their covers, xeroxing them and sending them around to my pals. Eventually I realized that no one else was sharing their poems before they were published.
But was easy to plan this book. Like the rest of the work that followed for years, the two poems in this book had a subtext grounded in New York City itself and so, at Alan's suggestion, with his encouragement, I went around the city taking photographs – the Morton Street apartment hadn't been robbed yet, I still had the cameras my father had given me as a kid – and also assembled new collages from stuff I found on the street, coming up with enough eventually so that each of the sections of the two works had an illustration facing it.
The city back then, so mysterious, impermeable. An impenetrable locus of hidden doings, serene, awesome in its ability to ignore. Its decay seemed regnant. And inevitable. There was no doubt that New York's great days were behind it. There was security in the knowledge that we were living among faded grandeur, that the theme was decline, that so much of this might be rubble soon. Some empire's capital, after it's been sacked. Matta-Clark was showing us, wasn’t he?
When it came to this too, we were so wrong. And the swelling, apparently unstoppable revival – though revival is not the word that those who have been priced out of those neighborhoods would likely use – that has long since spread to Brooklyn and the Bronx, makes those early days seem even further off, impossibly long ago.
The myriad worlds within the metropolis back then, each existed in parallel, independent of the other. Coterminous yet never touching, except at that one surface point: the street. There they deigned to let you peer at them. The world city, a new Paris. When, a few years later, in Superman II or III, Warner Bros. decided to place Lex Luthor's hideout in a hitherto-unknown concourse below Grand Central, it seemed obvious and easy. Of course, there were huge, abandoned train stations beneath our feet all over Manhattan. There had to be. This place was an endlessly arresting scrim. And all manner of dramas, from rewritings of Nadja to revivals of Fantomas, were surely being played out across it, beneath it, above it. If only it was possible to penetrate into those other worlds.
After I assembled all the illustrations, Alan and I went to work. The transformation of the rough typed pages along with the photos and pasted-together collages into a bound work seemed, as it surely does for everyone working on a first book, nothing less than miraculous. We worked with a pair of cheerily knowing lesbian typesetters. One of them adorned herself with radically sculpted eyebrows, a neat pageboy å la Louise Brooks, and extremely original makeup including large pastel-hued discs of pancake on either cheek. They were ensconced in a vast, dingy, echoing loft on Lafayette Street. Taking up a full corner of their space was a gigantic typesetting computer. The most advanced, the latest, the most up-to-date, we were assured. No doubt it had less computing power – as they say now about the Apollo capsules – than today's cheapest phone. It spit out thin strips of damp copy, reeking toxically, like enlargements fresh from the darkroom, one laborious page after another.
I'm not sure how many other perfect-bound books Alan had published by that time. Certainly, he had done magazines. A Hundred Posters was still getting turned out with an estimable consistency. It would continue issue after issue, for several more years. Nevertheless, he guided the process with a confident hand, as if he had been doing this for decades.
This is the way it went with Alan: he asked me if I had any ideas for the cover. In fact, I had. A couple of years earlier, I had spent a lot time at the Queens Museum, a rather sad building that had been used for both of the World's Fairs. It was one of the sites to which Learning to Read Through the Arts had expanded. In a half-abandoned storage room there, I came across piles of glossy brochures Robert Moses had printed up to promote the 1960 fair’s New York State pavilion. Across the front and back cover was a wonderful photo of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, under construction. In the foreground the Brooklyn approach ramps were already laid in and paved. The towers and the cables were already in place. Just one section of deck had been installed so far, though, in the center of the span, like a gigantic hyphen in the sky. It seemed to go so well with the photographs of the aerial walkways in the book itself.
My conscience was fairly clear when it comes to the means by which I had acquired my three or four copies of this brochure. I had essentially stolen them, certainly, but there had been piles and piles of them, stacked haphazardly in a sad neglected corner of a sad neglected museum. A museum so reduced in ignominy that it had to share its building with a skating rink. A museum whose principal attraction back then was a sprawling scale model of the city which hadn't been updated since the Fair opened, almost 20 years earlier. These brochures were just waiting for the day when they’d be consigned to the dumpster.
My concern back then was that we were going to use that cover without permission. As I recall there was no copyright page in that brochure, and no credits listed either, of any sort. I want to say that Robert Moses's name or likeness appeared on almost every page. While he was certainly good and dead by then, my then-hazy understanding of intellectual property law told me that what we were doing could conceivably get us in some sort of trouble. What kind of trouble, I wasn't sure but it seemed dicey. Part of me said that this was just poetry, just a poetry book that only a few people, a few hundred tops, would ever see. And no one cared about poetry anyway. But part of me was worried.
Alan took care of that problem in the same way that he dealt with every other issue, each of the inevitable glitches or apparent crises that arose while we worked on this book. He radiated calmness. He told me not to worry. So, I didn't. It was that unshakeable, imperturbable confidence, combined with his unfailing solicitude, continually seeking to ensure that my wishes when it came to the book were fulfilled, even more than the fact that this was my first book, which made this particular experience so wonderful. Each stage of the book's production thus turned into an occasion for pleasure: proofing the first set-up bits of copy the typesetters handed to us, reviewing the pasted-up boards, checking the blues. Because this was years and years before any of us acquired a personal computer, and anyone could produce justified text in any leading or font imaginable. That transformation, from smudgy typescript, itself just one step away from the handwritten sheet, to the bound book, was nothing less than amazing, a miracle in its way. And because Alan had everything so well in hand, this became, as it always should be for a first-time author, an adventure of unalloyed joy.
35. Cap Toes from Brooks Brothers
I was on the B train, heading uptown. It was the middle of the day and the car was empty. I had just started at Warner Bros. so the suits and blazers which eventually comprised my wardrobe hadn't yet taken over my closet. I remember what I was wearing: a pair of button-fly Levis, a striped Brooks Brothers button-down shirt and one of the cast-off, vintage, that is to say, used sport jackets. which in most cases were in fact parts of old suits, which I'd picked up on Lower Broadway. Plus, a pair of cap toe Brooks Brothers oxfords. I had two pairs of them, one black, one brown. Not wingtips, those were even more expensive. These were the restrained cap toes with that single, discreet band of decoration across the toe box. As the messenger for the Story Department at Warner’s I could see, because I got around town quite a bit those days, that I certainly wasn't the best dressed messenger in the industry, but I was holding my own. These were the standard elements of my get-up and with one exception, they all comported with my station in life. That is, neither the jacket nor the pants nor the shirt by themselves, when it came to the pathetically paltry salary I took home every two weeks, broke the bank.
Then there were those shoes. They seemed astronomically expensive at the time, And not just then. Now, decades later, I wouldn't dream of walking into Brooks Brothers, or its equivalent, and plunking down for a pair of shoes a sum equal to, adjusted for inflation, what each of them had set me back. But I was single, and when it came to the sumptuary laws I deigned to recognize, I had definite and unwavering opinions. As a longtime subscriber to Interview magazine, I knew that Andy typically attired himself similarly, though I’m not sure that was a significant driver for me.
I'd spent more on those shoes than any other single purchase I'd ever made, save my rent, and there it was a very close call as to which called for a bigger check to be written, with the possible exception of the Borsalino fedora purchased around that time at Paul Stuart.
So, imagine my surprise when, in that nearly empty B train, on its way to its terminus at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, out of the blue there appeared a well-dressed gent in his 60s sitting himself down on the same long longitudinal bench I was occupying. As I recall, he was wearing a very presentable suit, a gray pinstripe or a heather, along with a very richly complex silk tie, Hermès perhaps, and, to round it off, a suitably expensive-looking and appropriately battered Hartmann briefcase, entirely in keeping, all of a piece. But what drew my attention were his shoes.
I could not take my eyes off them.
They were remarkable. They were magnificent. They were simply splendid. I had never seen anything like them in my life. Just looking at them, simply having the opportunity to clap eyes upon them was, I realized in a flash, a life lesson in itself. And, the amazing thing was, he was wearing precisely the same shoes as me.
All the while I was goggling at this man's footwear, I was thinking about the evening in front of me, for some reason. Those thoughts were uppermost in my mind and have remained, bound up with the rest of the memories of this moment. There was some reading scheduled for that night and it was going to be down in Soho. Or maybe it wasn't a reading, maybe it was a concert. We were all going to see a lot of John Zorn around then. Bruce had turned us on to him. In any event, we were all going to be down there that night and my thoughts were tending to which place, for certainly it was going to have to be decided among us, we’d end up having dinner at afterwards. And I remember remarking to myself, at the very same time as I took in that amazing pair of shoes, that in all likelihood we were all going to end up at the Prince Street Bar, a joint for which I had developed a particular detestation.
Someone did have an affinity for that place, maybe it was Bruce, maybe it was Charles, perhaps it was someone else entirely. In fact, the restaurant was, for our purposes, entirely serviceable: the beer was reasonable, the burgers were big. The source of my resentment at least for that night was that we were going to end up in such a patently gauche place the likes of which, if I had my druthers, I would never have been caught dead in. The fact is, of course, that the Prince Street Bar itself is long gone, replaced decades ago, first by a series of dismayingly expensive French shoe stores, then by a succession of progressively down-market designer jean emporia.
The Prince Street Bar disappeared off this earth so long ago that certainly there must be middle-aged, indeed, aging, veritably aging, New Yorkers who fondly look back upon their salad years, when they were young and thin and poor, for whom recollections of the Prince Street Bar forever evoke comforting and warm memories.
For me, there was One University, which I was frequenting around then. It certainly seemed like it was going to become a permanent New York fixture. But how many people now remember Mickey Ruskin, who owned it, and who for some unfathomable, inscrutable reason deigned to let me and Alan and others who I would show up with, past the bar into the dining room area, that exclusive, well-lit, roped-off dining room? Why us of all people?
Max's, which had been his place too, was long gone by then. In addition to its role as a Warhol hangout, and a downtown music venue, Max's Kansas City had served as a Bennington rally-point in New York. And then there was the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on Chambers, which he seemed to have open for a few weeks only before he moved up to University Place. We made it there just a few times. It was expensive too. The last time: Talking Heads were playing, and Andy was at a table nearby, with Fran Lebowitz. But that was gone already as well. Long gone. Andy was someone you saw all over town. At openings, at parties, in espresso shops in Little Italy, at Ballato's on Houston St. So, there I was on the train, thinking those thoughts. I who had been in New York all of perhaps six or seven years, and had read my Proust, and thought I had that whole remembering-or-trying-to-remember, and understand, your-past, that whole thing, well in hand.
Then I looked up from my neighbor's footwear, took a look at his face and realized that I was sitting by John Vliet Lindsay. It had only been ten years or so since he had been mayor, or so it seemed. since he had been done down by Mike Quill, the transit union boss who brought the city to its knees. Now an MTA garage uptown has been named after Quill and half the buses cruising streets of Manhattan have decals plastered on them trumpeting his name. But John Lindsay, who some used to credit for keeping New York from going up in flames during those hot summers of rebellion in the Sixties, when almost every other American city was burning; who seemed, at least to several newspaper writers at the time, have the makings to be another Kennedy – young, aristocratic, an embodiment of the future, our future – there's nothing in this city bearing his name. He was just sitting there, unheralded, unacknowledged, unrecognized, on the uptown B train.
The sight of this man wearing the same dress shoes as I was wearing, as I'd seen Andy wearing too, as I gazed down at his oxfords, threw me for a loop. The thing was, Lindsay's shoes, though they were the same model, and looked actually to be the same size, and doubtlessly were bought in the same department in the same Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue, were entirely different from mine or Andy's. His pair had never, and this was indubitably clear, had never once been shined or polished or come within fifty furlongs of a shoe brush. They were stupefying. They were fantastically cracked and dried out and peeling. They resembled nothing so much as some three-dimensional, magisterial apotheosis of desertification, an object lesson of some sort, demonstrating to some hapless audience the price of inattention or irresponsibility or the wastrel life or something similar. They were fantastically ruined. They looked like Auden's face, but, if possible, worse.
I had never seen anything like them. And, glancing back up at the immaculately groomed Wall Street lawyer, for that was the life Lindsay had assumed after retiring from public office, in his irreproachable suit, I realized this was, indeed, after all, just a studied indifference. He was making a point. He had probably been buying just these shoes since he was a sophomore at Harvard, unlike me, or Andy, who had come so late to them. In fact, his brothers and his father and all his uncles had no doubt been wearing them for time out of memory. And, indeed, his treatment of them was surely, to his mother or his sisters or his wife, not all that unusual. He no doubt went down to the store, bought several pairs, wore them to death and then, five or ten years later, when they were finally dead, dead, and dead, scooted back to the shoe department and picked up another half dozen pair.
At this point that I remembered that Lindsay was a twin. Wasn’t his brother a Wall Street lawyer too? It didn’t matter, I decided.
A passage from a biography of T.E. Lawrence just then flashed through my mind. I must have read it back in high school. When he wasn't flying across the desert on a camel, Lawrence of Arabia made use of a Rolls Royce, according to this book. At that time, at the dawn of the auto age, those vehicles weren't only luxury rides for the rich but also, apparently, were sturdy enough to serve as staff cars for generals and such. Apparently, Lawrence flogged his Rollses, or Rollers, mercilessly, until they were ready for the junk heap. Then he would have them driven off a cliff and simply order up another one. It all seemed of a piece.
And these were the same shoes. We all were wearing the same shoes. And Andy and I were wearing them because... because of chance? Because of some sort of shared susceptibility to some larger sensibility? There were the shirts and the 501s and, yes, the shoes. But with Lindsay, it was different. I was certainly a part of the world that Warhol inhabited, though certainly only a tiny, insignificant part, but John Lindsay, he inhabited an entirely different world, light years away.
If I fell into a conversation with Andy what ever would I have to say? ‘I read Interview every month I have a tall pile on my shelf in the apartment. Bruce Andrews came by one day and tried to talk me into giving them all to him but I said, ‘No.’
Oh, that would go over really well.
And, of course, when it came to what Lindsay thought of Warhol, one can only conjecture. And yet, and yet, there we were: all dressed, at least from the ankles down, identically.
I wanted to believe, as I sat there on the B train, thinking of Andy, and all the places one ran into him, so many of them lost and gone already, and how it really wasn't so far-fetched after all, that I could run into this former mayor in the afternoon and maybe Andy this evening though certainly not at the Prince Street Bar, didn't it say something about this violent and decayed and vicious, yet somehow leveling, open – in some bizarre way – city, that we would all be so similarly shod?
But then, on the other hand, there was Lindsay's indifference to his footwear. Perhaps a studied, Episcopalian affect, but an indifference, a disregard, nonetheless. I would never have dreamed of treating my shoes, my most expensive possessions, so. I am sure Andy wouldn't have either. Maybe Peter Beard, but not Andy. So, was there some sort of message in Lindsay's oxfords? Some end-stage aristo gesture, some sort of insulting fillip that in all likelihood only another old St. Paul's or Buckley boy could decode?
I wasn't sure. The train pulled into 57th Street. We rose and I followed him out, impossibly tall and composed, the features weather-beaten yet still entirely aquiline, pushing through the turnstile, up the stairs to Sixth Avenue, to a part of Manhattan where not only do the skyscrapers create their own weather, setting up vicious windstorms on corners of their own choosing, but where they manufacture their own light too, an alternating, chilling shadow and black disorienting glare, into which, once my eyes finished adjusting, I saw he had disappeared.
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