Memoirs of a beatnik (13 page)

Maybe we all come once and then maybe Pete sucks Leslie off, Leslie goes down on O'Reilley, while Don and I watch. I guess then Pete would build up the fire, and we would smoke some hash. The wind comes up, it gets much colder, O'Reilley and Pete curl up around each other and go to sleep in the covers. Don starts nuzzling my neck, and we fuck dog-fashion, and Leslie comes up behind Don and slips it in, and we set up some kind of crazy syncopated rhythm that gets the bed rocking again, and Pete and O'Reilley sleep on. Finally we all go to sleep, just before dawn, with one numb arm each stuck under somebody else, and Don's feet sticking out of the covers because he's too long. Maybe Silver and Daddi-0, our house cats, come and sit on his feet to warm them and purr through our dreams.

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A Night By The Fire: What Actually Happened

Or maybe not. Pete is poking the fire, and the cheap old phonograph is playing the same Stan Getz record over and over. Don is sitting on the edge of the bed, playing drums with the poker against the fireplace. O'Reilley is lying next to the fire reading Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young. The fingers of her left hand play idly with Don's back under his shirt but he doesn't notice. Leslie is lying next to her, flat out on his back, smoking and looking at the ceiling. He has had two dance classes and is exhausted. I am on the cold side of the bed, away from the fire, but I have made up for it by going to bed in sweatpants and sweatshirt. I have a wool cap pulled down over my crew-cut and the covers up to my chin and only my nose and the lower part of my eyes are showing. I am rapping at Pete through the blankets about the surrealists. He grunts whenever I stop but probably doesn't hear anything at all. He is painting. Leslie hands me his cigarette to put out and I put it out on the floor. He says "Goodnight," and turns on his side, his back to me. He has a beautiful body, but his obvious indifference leaves him unattractive and me bored. O'Reilley has finished reading Kropotkin and puts it down on the floor by her side of the bed. "What a shame," she says about nothing special. Don stops drumming and stands up. "I'm going out," he says. "I'll be back in a while." He bends and kisses O'Reilley on the forehead, mumbles, "Good-bye, Baby," and splits. Pete fixes the fire and starts drawing a picture of the three of us going to sleep. We are curled up, spoon fashion, all on our right sides, facing the fire. My nose is cold. My nose is always cold, and usually numb. I stick it deliberately into Leslie's back to warm it. He jumps a little, in his sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I learned a lot from Ray.

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

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

So Susan and I sat there and answered Ray's mail, and took strange tapes to detective agencies, and delivered mysterious bundles of papers in Queens through a taxi window, and met Marlon Brando, who looked bugged and sad, and was. All the time we were there he was being pursued by a noisy brunette named Margie whom he had dated once on orders: all in the game. Margie was one of Ray's "clients." She was in love with Brando because he had taken her to his hotel and played her Tosca all evening instead of trying to make out. And in love with Margie was Morris Kahn, a big, quiet guy in the clothing business. Morris paid Ray to do publicity for Margie; he also bought Susan some shoes and generally looked after us while he told us all about his troubles with his lady, who wanted him to be as "polite" as Brando.

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

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

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114

Organs And Orgasms

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

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

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