Edie (40 page)

In Dr. Roberts’ room would be Edie . . . so thin that she cannot be given her shot standing up; she has to lie down on her stomach. It was a big shot—all those vitamins, niacin, methedrine, God knows what else—for a little girl, so she had to take it lying down

Meanwhile everyone who’s back in the corridor for the second or third time that day complains that the shots they received that morning haven’t worked. Out in the waiting room you can hear the people complaining that they haven’t even received their first shot yet.

And Dr. Roberts is stI’ll going on. In the middle of his thirteen-part plan he decides to tell you about a movie he saw on television . . . in detail. You, however, are telling him your ideas for whatever
you’re
going to do. But then Dr. Roberts begins to describe his idea for a plastic Kabuki house. Someone else is showing his sketches for redesigning the Boeing 707 with a psychedelic interior. Big doings at Dr. Roberts’ all the time.

Edle at Dr. Roberts’ from
Ciao!Manhattan

Now you decide to go back out through the waiting room, right? Now you have all the time in the world. Life is a breeze. You’ve used the sun lamp. I mean, you were in a great rush when you came in; now, finally, you decide you’ll leave.

But there in the room are all these people who are
not
Dr. Roberts’ special people and who stI’ll haven’t been serviced. They’re there to spend as much money as you have, but they’re not part of the “in” crowd. So they’re drifting off into craziness because they haven’t gotten their shots. A couple of people are wandering around . . . their poor systems are so riddled with the methedrine they got half an hour ago they feel is not working that they’ve come back for what Dr. Roberts calls “the booster.” The basic Dr. Roberts shot goes from ten dollars to fifteen dollars. As your resistance to the drug gets to the point of diminishing returns, you move on up. There is a big shot for twenty-five dollars, and if it doesn’t work, you go right back and get “the booster” for five dollars. That’s what some of these poor people are doing—standing out there waiting for the booster. But
you
. . . you are flying high, having just had your twenty-five-dollar special, and you walk out into the outer office and say: “Hi. Oh,
hi!
What a beautiful sweater! Gee, you look wonderful! How
are
you? Oh, hi! Isn’t it
wonderful
to see you! What’s happening?”

Before leaving, I’d often go and find Edie in Dr. Roberts’ sauna. If we’d been up all night on drugs, the sauna and steam bath were wonderful things. We’d go out and walk for blocks and blocks . . . just be together, because we didn’t know what we were saying half the time.

The speed tiling was so wonderful because everyone was walking around scared to death . . . scared because they couldn’t sustain that pace. And so these shots from Dr. Roberts and all those other speed doctors gave you a false sense of being together. You could face everybody when you went out at night. You could dance all night. It was like “the answer.” Nobody knew much about speed in those days.

Once Edie’s mother came to Dr. Roberts’. I remember she was on crutches. She looked like Betty Crocker—gray hair with a little hairnet, a blue print dress, and little glasses. She looked like a librarian from the Midwest standing next to Edie with her cut-off blond hair with the dark roots, thigh-high boots, a mini-skirt, and a kind of chubby fur jacket that looked like it was made out of old cocker spaniels. There
they were—the two of them. Mrs. Sedgwick had come to see if Dr. Roberts was taking good care of her little girl . . . and I guess he must have conned her, because Edie kept going there. I guess the parents paid for her treatment: it cost a lot for those shots.

EMILE DE ANTONIO
 Her mother didn’t seem to know anything about Edie’s life—except that it was no good. One day in the Factory, Edie said, I”ve got to go and see my mother or else she’s coming here. She wants to put me away!" I said, “Is there anything I can do to help?" She said, “Come with me.” So we drove to her grandmother’s on Park Avenue. Edie was afraid to go up to the apartment. So her mother came down. We all stood in the lobby. Her mother had this stick . . . a cane. She seemed unnecessarily harsh to me—I mean, in the way she was speaking to Edie. The discussion was about Edie’s rights; there was talk about hospitals. What I really remember is Edie’s mother hitting the floor with the cane with vehemence.

Edie seemed moderately rational; she talked very nicely. You had to know she wasn’t, but at the same time she was just as rational as the rest of those people seemed to be.

RICHIE BERLIN
 Edie took this rush of vitamins . . . so many vitamins that she smelled of them. It was during that whole era, darling, of “Where shall we go before we go to the Hippopotamus and before we go to Le Club?" I mean, everybody in the eyelash set went to Dr. Roberts to get their hearts started! To keep thin and keep it going. I kept saying, “I wI’ll
not
have a shot. I wI’ll not . . . that’s all there is to it.” Well, after my first one I walked all the way to the Village. I flew around the house. I cleaned. I charged in stores. I didn’t even know I was in Bloomingdale’s; I just had to acquire more and more things. I wrote notes. I wrote a sixty-five-page letter telling somebody I wanted him. I knew exactly where my head was going the whole time. If anyone had asked, “What do you mean, Richie? What do you mean? Get to the point,” I would have said, “I have to write you a note.” If they had said, “My God, you know, you are a very close friend of mine. I am not at my age, at thirty-nine, going into the bathroom to sit on the John and wait for a
note!
” I would have said, “Well, you just have to. That’s all!”

CHERRY VANILLA
 Often people got introduced to Dr. Roberts as a present. Going to him was the great gift of the time. If you really loved someone, you took him to Dr. Roberts as a gift and let him feel the
feeling. Or if you were trying to make somebody, you’d go around to Dr. Roberts, and after the shots you’d get very oversexed and you’d fuck. People used him in that way. His office was a social focal point.

I’ve forgotten who took me there first. Someone said, ‘Hey, Cherry Vanilla, let’s go over to Dr. Roberts’.” Cherry Vanilla is a name I thought up when somebody asked what I’d call myself if I wrote a column for a rock magazine, and I said, “Cherry Vanilla . . . scoops for you!” Everybody loved it. Anyway, someone said, “Come on, Cherry Vanilla,” and we went over to Dr. Roberts’. I was fascinated. All these freaky people were sitting around, rapping their brains out in the office, in the middle of the day.

Then Dr. Roberts moved his office. He had a sauna and a big mirrored room with a dance floor and a barre. Four floors. Never completed. You’d get your shot in the hallway, sometimes from the nurse. You and your friend could go in together and both get them at once, and even give each other shots. It was all big fun-and-games.

I became like an acid queen. I loved it. My looks got crazier and crazier. I started getting into things like pink wigs, teasing them up to make them real big and like bubbles. I’d wear goggle glasses and real crazy make-up: spidery lashes and white lips, and micro-minis. I saw a micro-mini on Edie and immediately started cutting everything off. Kenneth Jay Lane earrings. Big Robert Indiana love earrings . . . giant love paintings on my ears. Little bikini undies, a band around the top; and we made these silver dresses that were just silver strings hanging on us. I was surrounded by a lot of gay boys in designing and decorating who would always give me a hand in pulling some look together. I would go out half naked with see-through things. You took a scarf and wrapped it around you and thought you were dressed.

I gave Dr. Roberts a shot once. In the ass, in his office about five o’clock in the morning. I had been playing records at Aux Puces—I was the disc jockey there—and he had come around to visit and said, “If you come back to my office with me, 111 give you a shot.” It was a freebie, which was nice because those shots were not cheap.

I really got into having a needle in the ass. Just the feeling of it. I got into the pain of it. You got the shot, then this taste in your mouth, and you got a rush and you knew you were getting high. It was all very sexual in a way, and very “in” and social and stylish to do it. So I went back to his office with him and I gave him one and he gave me one.

I don’t know what he shot me up with, but it was something I had certainly never had before. I was really very numbed. Maybe it was cocaine. Sometimes he would shoot you with LSD. You never knew
what he was going to shoot you with. He’d throw a little surprise in every once in a while. So we got involved in a rather heavy sex encounter.

All of a sudden there was blood everywhere. I was bleeding like crazy. He laughed and said, “Oh, I think you should go and see a doctor.” Very bizarre. I started freaking out. I thought, “Oh, my God, this man has done something to me. He’s killed me. I’m going to the here in his office, all shot up with drugs, and it’s going to be a disgrace and terrible.” I told him I had to get out. He said, “No, no, you can’t leave. I’ll fix you. I’ll give you a shot.” I said, “No, no, no more shots!” I got dressed. I never thought he was going to let me out. Perhaps he was scared I would go to the police.

When I did get out, I ran around the corner to Aux Puces. Some of the staff used to hang out there very late at night taking LSD. Sure enough, they were there. We called doctors. We couldn’t get anybody. Then the bleeding began to subside suddenly—about seven in the morning. I never actually knew what happened. I had been cut inside—scratched with something, fingernails or jewelry . . . probably by accident. I think we both just got carried away.

Of course, I never frequented Dr. Roberts’ any more. That really kind of brought me to. I think that’s the last time I ever had speed in my life, or whatever it was Dr. Roberts gave me. I never touched a diet pI’ll or anything like that ever again.

Until them, it had been like living on the edge of life. It promised a good life without any tomorrow. You really believed that you were going to travel in this bubble right out to the end of the stratosphere. You weren’t going to have to cope with the normal structures of life and getting older and making a living. Life was supposed to be completely different.

EDIE SEDGWICK
 (
from tapes for the movie Ciao!Manhattan
) Dr.
Roberts says, “Hello, girls . . . how are we today? Are you all ready! Okay. Hop up. Put all your weight on this leg. Okay? Ready? My god, this rear end looks tike a battlefield.”

You want to hear something 1 wrote about the horror of speed? Well, maybe you don’t, but the nearly incommunicable torments of speed, buzzerama, that acrylic high, horrorous, yodeling, repetitious echoes of an infinity so brutally harrowing that words cannot capture the devastation nor the tone of such a vicious nightmare. Yes, Fm even getting paranoid, which is a trip for me. I don’t really dig it, but there it is.

It’s hard to choose between the climactic ecstasies of speed and cocaine. They’re similar. Oh, they are so fabulous. That fantabulous sexual exhilaration. Which is better, coke or speed? Its hard to choose. The purest speed, the purest coke, and sex is a deadlock.

Speeding and booze. That gets funny. You get chattering at about fifty miles an hour over the downdraft, and booze kind of cools it. It can get very funny. Utterly ridiculous. Its a good combination for a party. Not for an orgy, though.

Speedball Speed and heroin. That was the first time I had a shot in each arm. Closed my eyes. Opened my arms. Closed my fists, and jab, jab. A shot of cocaine and speed, and a shot of heroin. Stripped off all my clothes, leapt downstairs, and ran out on Park Avenue and two blocks down it before my friends caught me. Naked. Naked as a lima bean. A speedball is from another world. Its a little bit dangerous. Pure coke, pure speed, and pure sex. Wow! The ultimate in climax. Once I went over to
Dr.
Roberts for a shot of cocaine. It was very strange because he wouldn’t tell me what it was and I was playing it cool. It was my first intravenous shot, and I said, “Well, I don’t feel it.” And so he gave me another one, and all of a sudden I went blind. Just flipped out of my skull! I ended up wildly balling him. And flipping him out of his skull. He was probably shot up
. . .
he was always shooting up around the corner anyway.

SUSAN WRIGHT BORDEN
 We were invited up to Hyannis port to a Kennedy party and we all went over to Dr. Roberts’ to have shots to get up for the trip. Bob Neuwirth, Edie, and me . . . can’t remember who else went. That summer Dr. Roberts had an office on Long Island. He was always very into getting people up for what they were going to do. Whenever one of his patients was going to appear on TV, they’d spend the day at his office and do the sauna to get prepared for the event. The doctor was in on the trip to hyannis port and he planned the super-shot for everybody.