A Freewheelin' Time (29 page)

Fluctuations

When I moved back
to New York, Sylvia Tyson helped me find a place near her apartment on Stanton Street, a few blocks below Houston on the Lower East Side. Though it was a dingy-looking building, the apartment, on the top floor of a walk-up on East Houston just off Clinton Street, wasn’t so bad. Peter Stampfel, of the Holy Modal Rounders and the Fugs, lived on the first floor with what looked like an awful lot of people given the size of the apartment. Ian and Sylvia were touring, so unfortunately we didn’t see each other much.

My new place had a tub in the bathroom, the only room with a door, a minuscule bedroom, a living room with a little alcove-sized room just off it, facing the back of the building, and a kitchen. There was a window in every room.

I was making small clay sculptures of female figures I painted in a variety of colors and placed in boxes with other objects, like little environments or stage sets; a friend commented that I was making altars. I scrounged the streets for wooden milk crates to make freestanding cases for the “altars,” and to hold my books and records. Today these are made of plastic and are also for sale, but back then they were left on the street in front of supermarkets and delis. No one was supposed to take them but everyone did. They were made of hardwood, with hand cutouts on the sides, which made lifting easier. I painted the more banged-up crates in bright colors and stacked them along the living room wall, where they made a real nice unit.

Viewing the whole apartment as an empty canvas, I painted decorative borders on the moldings and windowsills. I painted the kitchen yellow ochre and with black paint doodled abstract designs and patterns as the mood struck me. There was no closet in the small bedroom, so with help from Jon, a friend who built theater sets with me, I put up a bar across the narrow room for my clothes. At Bon Bazaar, a store on Waverly Place that sold dyed burlap by the yard, I bought some in rich colors and made curtains for the closet and the windows. The price was right and the colors were wonderful—they made me think of Indian food and spices like red lentils and curries. Another choice spot was a Japanese import store on Eighth Street that sold, among other unusual things for that era, intricately printed lightweight cotton bedspreads from India perfect for making into skirts and dresses.

I was wound up with all-natural creative energy—no drugs. At night I was working at some theater or other, and during the day I took freelance jobs making sets or props for the theater or for industrial shows. On and off, I helped friends silkscreen posters and album cover designs at their storefront studio on East Ninth Street. They listened to Stockhausen and other modern composers who were new to me.

Q
uinton Raines had written a short theater piece and, with his brother Charles and another playwright, fashioned a play titled
Like I’m Talking to You Now,
which linked the scenes together like a novella. I had a role in a two-character scene by Quinton with the actor Tom Aldredge. We were part of the Loft Workshop theater group and the play was performed at a few small theaters and at the Café Au Go Go.

One of the producers of the Workshop wrote a note telling me I gave the best performance in the best scene in the play and I should seriously consider an acting career. I felt good about that.

When actor friends from the production suggested I go along with them to auditions, I did; but when I got a call back, inevitably I failed to show up. Hyper and unguarded in that period, I used the I Ching obsessively and listened to the Beatles and strange experimental music. I bought a pair of rose-colored glasses and wore them all the time, telling everyone that the world looked so much better through them. Then they disappeared. When I bought another pair, they broke. I didn’t buy a third pair; I got the message.

I
n the 1960s we were open to experimentation in all things, from natural to unnatural to supernatural. I believed that knowledge acquired from instinct and observation was as valid as an academic search for factual verity. Parsing everything was not a path to discovery—it was a deterrent. It wasn’t that I was against study and excavating for information, but I believed that overanalyzing was harmful and interfered with the ability to see. I was wary of entering a tunnel of thought that ignored the surrounding terrain and the weather above it.

One of the people on the Cuba trip was, like me, more interested in the arts and the mysteries than in the politics of revolution. He was into a lot of stuff, as we used to say, experimenting with being open to everything—no ego and no boundaries—using a lot of LSD to get there. Though I wouldn’t take the drugs, I was interested in our meandering talks, which covered different subjects triggered by the trip to Cuba, including the survival of artists, eccentrics, and outsiders in general within a Communist society—or any society, for that matter. We mulled over the ideas of the French Surrealists and Antonin Artaud, the mad genius and founder of the French Theater of Cruelty, responsible for the concept of theater in the round and the belief that theater was about the communion between spectator and actor. I had read Artaud’s book
The Theater and Its Double
while in Cambridge.

Although I wasn’t using any drugs or drinking anything stronger than wine, I was highly sensitive—a receptacle. I had trouble sorting what I was receiving. Quieting my overactive mind was exhausting at times.

Occasionally I would smoke some marijuana, but usually it made me overly sensitized to what was going on around me. I didn’t need it; I was already there. It was painful to see too well and too much. Everything resonated. I became high-strung and paranoid. I found that if I sat around while others smoked I would have a good time. The only things I was using were cigarettes and the coins I tossed to access the wisdom of the I Ching.

O
ne night at the Kettle of Fish, Bob and I had an intense conversation. I sensed something about him that kept me from saying much; mainly I listened. He talked about drugs, fame, faith, mysticism, women. There were only a few women he respected, he said, and I was one of them. Only Sara, whom he married, and I knew what was up. It was as if he were going down a list and checking people off.

Allen Ginsberg was not to be discarded, he said.

He was giving me advice: Know you cannot need anyone or anything and don’t believe. All is meaningless.

The bleakness of his words made me anxious because they reinforced my general sense of apprehension. I rarely knew what to make of the feelings of foreboding that came over me—they came and went without warning. At times they coincided with bad things, like the car accident I’d been in some years earlier. Maybe, I thought, this meeting with Bobby was the reason I had been feeling uneasy that day. How painful it was to know him.

A
t some point I lost my sense of place and began to float. At a theater I met an actor who was a bit of an eccentric, which wasn’t unusual for that place in those times. He was older, probably in his midthirties, and he reminded me of Antonin Artaud. Though not quite in the same manner as Artaud, this guy turned out to be an eccentric who was genuinely scary.

One afternoon he announced at the theater, where I was working on scenery, that he needed a place to stay. My first thought was to hand over my keys. Why not be spontaneous and generous? My political and mystical beliefs would coincide. The generosity of spirit that was prevalent among the Cubans I’d met and in my reading of Rimbaud, Krishnamurti, and Zen texts seemed to point that way. I mistakenly saw in this actor a quiet spontaneity—a kindred spirit—yet he was anything but that. He had madness to mix with his mysticism and that was what I failed to see in his flat dark eyes and seemingly peaceful manner.

I did not hand over the keys right away, at least. I continued doing whatever I was doing and later we talked some. I saw him several times and then stupidly, casually offered him a set of keys. It would have been better to be more rational and analytic, after all. Some part of me had to know I was overriding the basics tenets of big-city survival smarts.

At a rehearsal for Quinton’s play, when he read the scene I was in with me, he changed the whole tenor by making it hip and offbeat. He told the director he knew the real truth, one that the play was unable to deal with.

A friend who had worked with him tried to warn me about this man, but it was a strange time and I was in a strange place. I wish I had been able to heed her good advice and that of the wiser people around me, but at that point, I was acting out, loose and free. If I’d been doing drugs, the whole scene would have been that much worse.

In an old dusty loft on the Bowery, he played a vinyl LP album called the
Nirvana Symphony,
which he insisted I needed to hear. I didn’t note the name of the composer or the performers. Later I learned that the piece was by the Japanese composer Toshiro Mayuzumi and that an artist with a great-looking name, Yoko Ono, had done the album cover.

Listening to the music put me into a trancelike state that stalled into complete stillness while the record was being turned over, yet once side two began playing, the visions I’d been having resumed. At the end of the record, shaken by what I had gone through, even though everything returned to normal, I felt a sense of foreboding as well as anticipation. I tried to write and draw what I had experienced, but it wasn’t easy. I had gone through the looking glass.

Over a period of a month I listened to the album a few more times. Although the experience was unsettling, I was not frightened. I wanted to understand it somehow and in some way, and see if the event would repeat itself. At the second session, the reverie ended with a vision of burning and fire accompanied by a feeling of great sadness and a foreboding sensation that was even more pronounced. The third time was more like the first and ended with me feeling shaken yet calm and reconciled. Sometime later I read
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Though I’d taken no drugs, this was the closest I could come to an explanation of the experience I’d had.

O
ne night in October I came home from the theater to find my apartment destroyed by fire. The Fire Department had managed to contain the fire where it had started and there was no damage to any of the other apartments in the building. Fortunately neighbors had rescued my two cats, Harley and Ofelia. The cause of the fire was thought to be faulty electrical wiring, a common problem in old buildings. But I suspected that the eccentric actor had started it. After my experiences listening to the
Nirvana Symphony
he thought I had special powers. I was frightened by him and didn’t want to go in his direction anymore. After the fire, he disappeared.

It was a terrifying sight to see my home all burnt and soggy and smelly. I have a lasting image of one of my boots lying half charred on the gunk-filled floor of the small bedroom, and a sweater with its sleeves partially eaten by fire hanging on a hook at the entrance. They looked like dismembered body parts. It was horrible. With a jolt I recalled the vision I had experienced a few weeks before.

Bob’s old Gibson guitar was nowhere to be found. The green coat that I had bought in Italy and was wearing on the
Freewheelin’
album cover was somewhere in the pile of black, stinking clothing in the bedroom.

Most of my books and records survived the fire because the wall unit I had made from the stacked milk crates did not burn, although everything in them held the smell of fire for a very long time. A dark pattern of fire licks decorated the edges of the covers and backs of the books and record albums. All my “altars” and other artwork had burned to ash. A few mementos and other irreplaceable items vulnerable to flames survived because they were in the alcove off the living room that the fire, in its blind fury, had bypassed.

That night and for a short time afterwards I stayed in the storefront on East Ninth Street that my friends used as a studio. Other friends gave me clothes, and Bob gave me some money; so did my mother and Fred. I was very distraught and haunted by the fire, and my feelings were augmented by what I realized too late was a premonition or warning vision. Yet at the same time I felt oddly liberated by this “cleansing by fire.” I could not bring myself to tell anyone about what had happened when I listened to that mysterious album. It was too incredible on its own, and I didn’t relish the thought of being cast as a psychedelic, spaced-out hippie freak.

A short time later my friend Janet took me in, with my two cats, to live with her in her one-bedroom flat on West Twelfth Street. It wasn’t very roomy but it had a working fireplace and was on the third floor of a nice elevator building. Janet had been living in France for the past few years, and when she came back to New York she had stayed with me on Houston Street. We were used to living together in small places. After Johnny Herald and Janet had broken up, we were no longer a foursome, but Janet and I remained a twosome. We were always in and out of each other’s lives in some way, no matter where we were living. She had come to stay with me in Italy in 1962, and some years later when both of us were living in different countries in Europe we visited back and forth.