And then . . . and then at that exact moment -- and I swear I’m not making this up -- the sky split open as if from cesarean surgery, as if ripped by the knife blade of geese, and there was a cloudburst of typhoon proportions. Soaking, blinding, the rain spilled on us in such volumes that within minutes every living soul had fled the park. Even pigeons took shelter. Washington Square was totally emptied. It would take more than a deluge, however; more than the river of time itself, to wash away the magic, the winged reminder that there are wonders in play on this planet whose eerie beauty urban man, with all his ingenuity, all his ambition, all his vanity, can never ever quite match. Not Soutine, not Pollock, not even Graves, who came as close as any artist has to concretizing in paint the hair-raising yet somehow nurturing music of the wild.
I’d been in the Big Apple less than ninety days when I joined New York Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. It was a relatively new organization, just starting to gain traction, and it didn’t matter that I had no intention of making films, I had credentials as a critic (albeit in faraway Seattle), and since the objective of the Cinematheque was to promote experimental artists and their work, the group welcomed any and all support. For my part I’d had a keen interest in noncommercial movies since being introduced to “An Andalusian Dog,” the shocking 1929 collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, at a University of Washington screening the previous year.
One night each month, I believe it was the first Thursday, the Cinematheque would show recently completed films or work-in-progress by such underground directors as Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas. For members only, the screenings were at midnight at the New Yorker Theatre on upper Fifth Avenue, and I was a dedicated attendee; dedicated, perhaps, to a degree that verged on the obsessive if not the silly. What follows are two cases in point.
The vast majority of underground films were short, seldom exceeding fifteen or twenty minutes. Andy Warhol’s movies were the exception -- epic in length if minimalistic in content -- so when it was announced that the premiere of Warhol’s latest effort would run a mere ninety minutes (his aptly named Sleep, the previous year, had run six hours), Cinematheqies took heart. Moreover, the subject of the new film, its “star,” was the erudite Henry Geldzahler, a highly influential museum curator and gadfly in the NY art world, and legion were those who courted his favor.
A nearly full house gathered to watch Henry Geldzahler, in which the curator was filmed sitting in an easy chair in what appeared to be a sunlit Hamptons beach house, smoking a cigar. And that was it. For an hour and a half. The camera was stationary throughout. There were no close-ups, no long shots, no fades or dissolves -- and no sound track. Except for the arm that held the cigar, Geldzahler was motionless. After about thirty or forty minutes of this, I overheard grumbling. Several people seated near me got up and left. Reminding myself that in Zen it is said, “If something is boring for five minutes, try it for ten; if it’s boring for ten, try it for fifteen,” and so on, I was determined to stick it out. For this, I was rewarded.
In an otherwise static film, a couple of things were happening that held my attention. First, Geldzahler, as time went on, was growing obviously, genuinely uncomfortable. He neither spoke nor signaled, and made no move to rise, but his increasingly annoyed expression and rigid body language were those of a man who could barely wait for this experiment to end; and since this sentiment was shared by many, if not most, in the theater, it created in an odd, serendipitous way that sense of audience identification for which great actors and writers so often strive.
Then, there was the lengthening ash on the cigar. If puffed gently and undisturbed, a well-made, slow-burning cigar tends to hold its ash, and this fat stogie, doubtlessly of Cuban origin, burned on and on (on and on), its ash intact. As the ash grew longer, it became, for me at any rate, not just the focal point of the film but riveting.
Next to Geldzahler’s chair was a freestanding ashtray, the kind one used to see in hotel lobbies, and on several occasions later in the film Henry reached down and made as if to knock the ash off into the tray -- only to pull the cigar back at the last second, and take another puff. Each time he did this, tension escalated. Gradually, the suspense became as great as anything in a Hollywood thriller. The fate of that long cigar ash -- Would Henry ever flick it? Why didn’t it just fall off on its own? -- was comparable to the fate of an imperiled Jimmy Stewart or Tippi Hedren in the most spellbinding Hitchcock masterpiece. I was breathing hard and, metaphorically at least, on the edge of my seat. And when at long last the ash could defy gravity no more, its tumble was cathartic, the release very nearly orgasmic.
The film ended. The houselights came up. And I was simultaneously flabbergasted and embarrassed to see that as near as I could tell there was not another soul in the theater! I alone had stuck it out.
Speed-walking for the exit at a pace that suggested the place was on fire, I was convinced that anyone who happened to see me would conclude one of the following: (1) I was the coolest, most Zen dude in town; (2) I was a poser, a phony out to prove that I alone possessed the sensitivity and intelligence to comprehend the meaning of such a challenging film; or (3) I was a naive sucker from the sticks whom the crafty Warhol had succeeded in duping.
On another first Thursday, a month or two later, I attended an opening at a major art gallery, where I chanced to meet a beautiful British film actress, young but already well known. I won’t identify her as she is alive and still acting, often appearing in TV miniseries from the UK as well as episodes of Masterpiece Theater. Our conversation was going so well that we elected to continue it elsewhere, and did so in the bar of her uptown hotel. After two or three drinks, she squeezed my hand, looked meaningfully into my eyes, and invited me up to her room. I glanced at my watch. Oh no! It was well past eleven and the Cinematheque film program would be starting at midnight. Stammering that I was duty bound to go watch some important underground movies, I kissed her on the cheek and fled to the New Yorker.
Now, my all-time favorite accolade from a book reviewer was when Fernanda Pivano, Italy’s best-known critic, wrote in a leading Italian newspaper that “Tom Robbins is the most dangerous writer in the world.” I never read my reviews, even in English, but others sometimes pass choice bits along, so when I had occasion to meet the legendary Signora Pivano at a reception in Milan, I asked her what she meant by that wonderfully flattering remark. She replied, “Because you are saying zat love is zee only thing that matters and everything else eese a beeg joke.” Well, being uncertain, frankly, that is what I’d been saying, I changed the subject and inquired about her recent public denial that she’d ever gone to bed with Ernest Hemingway, whom she’d shown around Italy in the thirties.
“Why didn’t you sleep with Hemingway?” I inquired.
Signora Pivano sighed, closed her large brown eyes, shook her gray head, and answered in slow, heavily accented English, “I was a fool.”
Okay, back to the New York Cinematheque. Why did I choose to go watch a bunch of jerky, esoteric, often self-indulgent 16mm movies rather than sleep with the sexy British actress? Move over, Fernanda, there’s room for two fools on your bus.
So many times and with such vigor did Eileen and I kiss during our months of cohabitation in New York that the sheer number of our kisses would have confounded Carl Sagan; while our osculatory energy, if converted to electricity, might have illuminated Times Square and half of Coney Island. Our mingling of mouth meat, Eileen’s and mine, was so persistent, so manifold that it’s impossible now to single out any of our individual smooches for special attention, which may account for the fact that the only kisses that do stand out, the only two I actually remember from that period, were brief, dry, and devoid of passion (and thus could not have involved Eileen). One was the previously described dumb, wimpy peck of rejection I planted on the cheek of that British actress. The other was bestowed on me by Allen Ginsberg, the only man who’s ever succeeded in kissing me on the lips.
It was a wintry day
in 1965, and Ginsberg and I sported snowflakes in our hair and beards as we paraded in front of the Women’s Detention Center on West Tenth Street, Greenwich Village. The march, the first of its kind and none too large, had been organized by “Lemar” (Legalize Marijuana) to protest that the prison was crowded with females of all ages whose sole criminal act was the private, orderly, nonviolent inhalation of tiny plumes of smoke given off by a smoldering weed. From time to time, a girl would appear at a barred window to signal gratitude and encouragement before being ordered -- or dragged -- away.
Amidst the swirling snowflakes, like the orbs of mad polar bears, flashbulbs incessantly popped and glowed. Obviously, all those cameras weren’t being aimed by the media. Some in our group estimated that at least a half-dozen law enforcement agencies had representatives on the scene. Perhaps to inspire fear and promote intimidation, the various city, state, and federal agents made no effort to hide either their presence or their documentation, and I, for one, was growing increasingly nervous.
My anxiety must have shown in my expression, maybe in my body language as well, because at one point Ginsberg laid a gentle hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry about it.” He recognized my callow face from Lemar meetings at the Peace Eye Bookstore, though at that time had not learned my name. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeated, nodding at our swarm of paparazzi. “In the long run, these fuzzy shots in some cop’s folder will do you more honor than your face on the cover of Newsweek or Time.” Then he kissed me lightly, exerting scant more pressure than a snowflake.
My immediate reaction I don’t recall, but on many occasions in years to come I would silently thank him for the perspective: a lesson in attitude made all the more indelible by the kiss.
Such was his calling, I suppose. A hot-wired sutra slinger, a Vendantic versifier, a Wurlitzer of howling meat drunk on holy quarters, Ginsberg -- invoking the eternal within the ephemeral; wholeheartedly celebrating paradox and confusion as the fundamental fluids in which the human condition hangs suspended (thereby refining our base dissatisfactions into the more luminous chemistry of acceptance, compassion, goofiness, and grief) -- Ginsberg had the capacity to cast a net of enchantment around nearly everything in life, from a busted dusty sunflower to a potential bust by the morality police.
Not long ago, the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps honoring the greatest modern American poets. The face of Allen Ginsberg was not among them. It figures, doesn’t it?
Eileen and I fled New York in the middle of the night. Our hasty exit, however, was neither as dramatic nor as nefarious as it sounds.
Eileen Halpin, short, brown of hair and feisty of spirit, with soulful eyes and a mouth so sensual it could prompt the pope to dive headfirst off his balcony, was a student in the art department at the University of Washington. We had met in August of ’64 just weeks prior to my departure for New York, when I was still under the sway of the Redheaded Wino, and spent three or four lovely sleepless nights together before I left Seattle. I never expected to see her again, but once I’d settled in what New Yorkers were just beginning to call the “East Village” (having dropped off Susan and Kendall in Richmond and picked up B.K., who found lodging in the tenement house next to mine), Eileen and I commenced a correspondence perfumed with such mutual attraction that not much more than a month had passed before I was meeting her train at Grand Central station.
Ever spunky and independent, Eileen wasted little time in landing a job waitressing at Café Renzi, a popular Greenwich Village coffeehouse, just down the street from where a kid named Bob Dylan was starting to flex his adenoids. Although her earnings were small, they augmented my savings, subsidizing to some extent my research. By late June ’65, however, those savings were so depleted that coffeehouse tips were insufficient to prop them up. And then there was the matter of Ken Kesey and the weather . . .
June was pistol-whipping Manhattan with a dead flounder; the air thick with heat, humidity, hydrocarbons, and the near-evil effluvia of rotting garbage. Our apartment lacked air-conditioning or even a fan, so to keep cool in the evenings we’d crawl through a window and sit on the fire escape. When Eileen was at work, I’d read out there, straining my eyes in the stray glare of a streetlight. As chance would have it, the novel I’d begun reading that summer was Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, which, set in the Pacific Northwest, was sodden with images of green moss, green ferns, green cedars and firs, cool green drizzle, and cold green rivers: such a saturation of greenness that it would have sent an ol’ desert rat like Gaddafi into shock, causing him to chant “beige, beige, beige, beige, beige . . .”
One midnight (I’d been splashing in Kesey puddles and, not coincidentally, it was only days before July’s rent was due), Eileen returned from Café Renzi to find me packing my bags. “Get your darling stuff together, little darlin’,” I said. “We’re betraying New York ’ere the cock crows thrice.” Our landlord’s real estate office was on the ground floor of our building and it would be up and running by nine. By the time it opened, Eileen and I and our belongings were crammed in the trusty old Valiant, putting across western New Jersey. As we’d crossed the Hudson, I’d waved au revoir and “later, man,” to the ghosts of Soutine and Pollock, thanking them for their nine months of service to my Protestant ethic.
There’d been another motivation for escaping New York. The area around Tompkins Square Park where we lived had for many decades been a neighborhood of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants. By the early sixties, however, it had become increasingly populated by Puerto Ricans (soon they’d be displaced by hippies, but that was yet to come), and at night, young Hispanic gangs dominated street life. Incidents of violence were fairly rare, though the nocturnal prevalence of knots of young Latin males on corners or on tenement steps created a certain sense of wariness and unease. Walking home late from Stanley’s Bar on Avenue B, I was always alert for trouble, a tiny bit on edge even when accompanied by a muscleman like B.K.
The two rival gangs in our hood were “the 12th St. Boys” and “the Dutchmen.” Why a group of tough teens from Puerto Rico would choose to identify with cheese-making, ice-skating, Northern European windmill keepers, I was never to fathom, but I did learn other things about these Latino Dutchmen and I learned them firsthand.
The competing gangs staked out and defined their territory by chalking their names on every available wall. One afternoon as I was walking up East Tenth Street, I witnessed just such a verbal flag-planting by a party of so-called Dutchmen, observing that they, as usual, were misspelling their own sacred name. The leader of this contingent had just written D*U*C*H*M*E*N” on a brick facade and stepped back to admire his handiwork when -- motivated by an uncontrollable editorial impulse, a force that had operated in my life since early childhood -- I walked over, demanded the chalk (the gangster was too stunned or, smelling blood, too amused to refuse), seized it and inserted a big chalky capital T. “There,” I said, “that’s how you spell it. D*U*T*C*H*M*E*N.”
It was only then, as I handed back the chalk, that the utter recklessness of my impromptu pedagogery hit me. Good God, Tom, what have you done! As I prepared to sprint for my life, pursued by a pack of urban wolves, the boys nodded. They smiled. They muttered their thanks in Spanish and in English. And I walked away unscathed, resisting any impulse to accelerate my pace or glance back over my shoulder. It had turned out well, after all. It had. But it wasn’t over.
These gangbangers (ages fourteen through eighteen) had a lot of time on their hands. As they loitered in doorways or in nooks of Tompkins Square, they talked. They conversed for hours, day and night, and as I was to learn, they argued; argued about an amazingly wide range of subjects: not merely sports and pop culture, but current events, history, geography, and nature (including human and animal sexuality). You can see where this is going. I, the gringo who had the education to correct their spelling and the cojones to scribble their name (illegally, of course) on a wall, became their trusted arbiter. From that day on, I s
carcely could pass a group of Dutchmen without being called upon to settle some debate.
It was kind of flattering, kind of cool, being an oracle to a gang in the mean streets of New York, but I sensed that my position as a one-man ambulatory search engine could only lead to no good. What if an argument grew overly heated and I sided with some younger, weaker member or members rather than the leader of the pack? What if they were to discover that unwittingly or to hide my ignorance I’d given them wrong information? What if the 12th St. Boys had their own mentor, a retired professor or something, and he were to challenge me to a dramatic High Noon erudition face-off? This was before the National Rifle Association helped assure that any hotheaded punk in America could access a handgun, but it was rumored that each and every one of these gangsters carried switchblades. I couldn’t very well avoid the Dutchmen or resign my position. The situation wasn’t exactly urgent, but it did serve as an added incentive to, as Mark Twain, put it, “light out for the territories.”
We not only lit out, we slept out. Financially stressed, we eschewed commercial accommodations, electing to sleep in parks, fields, or, one night in Minnesota, a wrecking yard where the Valiant did not look out of place among the corpses of broken cars. It was summer, nights were balmy, so camping out under the stars should have been pleasant. And it was except for one small fly swimming backstrokes in the ointment: we had but a single sleeping bag.
Each night, a road-worn Eileen would slither into the bag. Then, like stuffing a one-pound sausage casing with two pounds of pork, I’d force my way in beside her, grunting, twisting, and squirming. Once both were sufficiently encased, neither could move. Unable to turn over, flex, or shift positions in any manner, we were plastered against one another, my face to the back of her head because if face-to-face we would have spent the night inhaling each other’s exhalations. Sexual intercourse, naturally, was out of the question. Not even Houdini could have pulled it off, except perhaps if his partner were a yoga instructor. We felt like an Egyptian two-pack in that damn bag: King Tut and his sister Tutti.