|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
also posted: |
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON in early July, I ran into Lenny Horowitz, art critic and moviemaker, outside the Safeway on West Broadway. "I've just come back from the Figaro" he said. "It reopened a week ago and all your friends are there". I agreed that was good news. Since the Figaro had closed seven years before, there hadn't been anywhere like it; no place where you could sit over an espresso and rap, read, play chess or just bullshit with your friends. The Figaro was a legend. Started by Tommy Ziegler, a block from Bob Dylan's place at MacDougal & Bleecker streets in the Sixties, it was probably the Village's single most important meeting place for the literati of its day. Everybody I knew had happy memories of it. I read the galleys for at least three of my books there and at one time or another sipped coffee with most of my friends. But an influx of fast food vendors and the general decline of Bleecker Street closed it down in 1969 and Ziegler headed for Hollywood. When I arrived at the new version a few moments later I found it better than my fondest memories. Just like the old days: the same yellowing, lacquered copies of Le Figaro covering the walls; stained glass window panels here and there; opened windows with tables beside them and sprawling along the sidewalk outside; and a front section of about a dozen tables and a raised portion in the rear with about two dozen more, low iron railings dividing them. Only the Tiffany lamps were missing, replaced by an enormous multi-tentacled chandelier with an art nouveau octopus. Fantastic! Many familiar faces were there: John Filler, who'd years ago married Mary Travis at a Figaro party; hoaxer Joey ('the cathouse for dogs') Skaggs; Gene Maslow, last seen at Aurobino's Pondicherry ashram; Dylan's friend Lola; photographer and stud Ken Van Sickle; filmmaker Gloria Sylvestro. A dull Manhattan summer looked suddenly more interesting.
Back again the next day I noted that all the customers were in seventh heaven, spending all their time congratulating each other on their good taste in returning. Lenny revealed that he'd been coming in four times a day (it never closes) and most of the old hands (male) were eyeing the pretty waitresses like connoisseurs. A dark-haired beauty wearing what appeared to be a black slip caught my eye and I told her she looked "absolutely irresistible. She looked a little startled at first and then smiled. Her name is Zoe, an art student at Pratt. The waitresses work hard for relatively little money, she revealed, averaging about $40 in tips per shift. The old Figaro's legendary policy of allowing customers to sit as long as they liked was still in force although the waitresses now suffered more from people who monopolize a table for an hour and then leave a quarter tip. Back home, I resolved to start keeping a diary.
Friday, July 16: The mystique has already spread from customers to staff who are now wearing spiffy Figaro T-shirts (available for $3.50 at the shop next door) and tonight I got into conversation with a teenage beauty whose dearest wish is to wear one legitimately. Wearing a big floppy hat from under which peeped masses of Little Orphan Annie-type curls, she said it was her life's ambition to be a Figaro waitress and she planned to keep coming in as a customer until she achieved it. Figaro waitresses, undisputed stars, have a legendary reputation on this stylist stage set on which we all nightly play our parts. They have a legendary reputation as love goddesses about whom we all fantasize continually. I myself have been secretly in love with doe-eyed Robin, the only holdover from the early era, for at least ten years. On my first visit the other night she flung her arms around me and said: "Welcome home". My response was such that Lenny said that in all the years he'd known me he'd never before seen me in a public show of affection, which is sad if it's true. Since the Figaro closed Robin had been married and divorced and now lives with a musician. Sunday, July 18: A black guy is on the steps next to the Cafe Borgia across the street. The Fig's famous operatic tapes are playing so loudly that it's impossible to hear him but he has drawn the usual big crowd that assembles for anything on this corner. Johnny Redd's $6000 chrome-plated motorcycle with its fancy layers of filigree metalwork and hi fi speakers has drawn the biggest mob this week but the purple van, plushly fitted out like a mobile whorehouse, was a crowd stopper last night. Blacks usually make the most impressive appearances, with or without vehicles, and not the least of these is the towering giant who parks his pimpmobile beside the hydrant at 2am and strolls in with a pair of knockout white ladies wearing skintight dresses. The witching hour seems to be midnight when couples from uptown arrive by taxi, presumably after the theatre. STOMP THE FAGS was scrawled on the men's room wall and somebody had appended to it: 'If you're such a bad-ass, shout that out loud in The Spike' (a notorious leather bar) 'on a Thursday night'. The graffiti isn't up to Sixties standards when an early scrawl, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' made an item for my Village Square column and much later the title of an Edward Albee play. The late Bob Reisner used to bring his New School class here to view the wall art and thinking that this current batch probably lacked a documenter, I made notes. Life is a Walt Disney production and Take only the path with a heart were the first to catch my eye, and then the poignant Before I met you it was too early; now it's too late. Most of the others were only so-so: 'Disarm Rapists....Fuck Socialism....Arm the V Vagrants....Dylan's gay...I was a delegate here from NC to support busing'. The only one I really liked was: Just like the old Figaro. Even the bad service. But the waittresses are still pretty. Falling in love with Figaro waitresses is an old tradition and Lenny says that there's always been keen competition between customers and staff for their affection. Monday, July 19: I could hardly wait to get back to my regular table by the window after a disastrous outing to Queens to see a cow art show in the local museum where overdressed suburbanites were lining up for plastic glasses of imitation milk. The only relief was in meeting Ray Johnson, an artist about whom I'd done my first Voice column in 1958. Back at the Fig who should turn up but Peter Frank who reminded me that we'd first met at a Ray Johnson gathering in Central Park. I didn't remember that, thinking that I had met him only last fall when I watched him in the lobby at the Whitney Museum acknowledging the greetings of a continual procession of lovely women with all of whom he appeared to be on intimate terms. I introduced myself at that time, observing that I'd rarely seen anybody so friendly with so many people. He was very modest about it but I determined there and then to read some of his art writings to learn what made him so renowned. Regrettably, I still haven't.
Considering how many hours I spend sitting here it's not surprising that I see so many familiar faces from my past. Often I don't know who they are but lately I have begun to pay more attention with the realization that yesterday's bit part in the drama of your life may well turn up playing a major role in some future scene. At any rate, this business of repeating cycles is getting to be a preoccupation: the other night, for the ump-teenth time, I dreamed I was back at boarding school only this time it was peopled by all the people I know now instead of the ones I knew then. (Whatever happened to them I wonder?). Gloria said it probably meant I had finally exorcized the dream and that I wouldn't have it again. Nevertheless, I feel I'm onto something with this 'secondary character' insight, i.e. people who played the tiniest part in your life the first time you met them. It made me wonder if when we die we pass down this endless corridor lined with all the people we've ever met, spending an infinite time with each to straighten out, correct or even repeat the relationship we had with them last time around. The clearest indication of how much of a club the Fig is becoming is that the waitresses spend almost as much time here off duty as when they're working. Janet, the baby faced blonde in tight jeans, the apron string bisecting her buttocks, was sitting in the back when I told her I'd always thought of her as a typical surfer girl. It seems I was right. Tuesday, July 20: I asked Zoe (the art student, most claim to be actresses) if she'd copy the graffiti from the ladies' room wall for me and she returned with the following:
As she was reading the last one to me, bearded Richie (one of the managers) seized her by the waist and carried her back into the ladies room. And locked the door. I've often noticed him fondling Jennie, another cute one I fancy, and this demonstration of droit de seigneur pissed me off. I mentioned it to Lennie, back at the table, and he laughed and we got (inevitably) into how hard it is to get laid. Lenny went into his usual bit of how simple it is to meet women and he does find it easier to talk to strangers than I do. I always get put down as some kind of sex fiend, or maybe think I will be, and fail to act. Shyness (or cowardice) I suppose, whereas Lenny's approach actually seems to work. He was the first to strike up an acquaintance with Elizabeth, a nightly regular who wears dark shades and a rhinestone love pin. Once I began to talk to her myself, I found a self-contained, interesting woman of obviously independent means (source as yet undetermined) and a fair knowledge of archaeology. She writes poetry and loves the Middle East whose memory she cherishes by hanging around the Lebanese coffee shops further up MacDougal street. "Where's Elizabeth?" I asked and Lenny made some rude remark about her and said she hadn't been in for a couple of days. The conversation shifted to hookers and I remarked that it would be useful to have a discount punch card valid with a friendly one who clocked your card every week to the mutual satisfaction of both sides. It would not only be a money saver in the long run but would release a lot of time usually spent in the pursuit of getting laid. "Do women ever have this problem?" I asked. Apparently not. At that moment, Zoe dropped by the table and declared that Israelis "are the horniest men in the world". Wednesday, July 21: Elizabeth came in tonight as I was scribbling some notes and I mentioned Lenny without repeating his putdown. She wrinkled her nose. "I just can't stand to sit with him for long" she said, which may have explained last night's outburst. "There are some people who tire me very easily". It seemed like a good time to bring up the matter of how to pick up strange women. I asked Elizabeth what she said to the men who invited themselves to sit at her table. "I've gotten very wary" she said, "because I've had some bad experiences. It's a pity really because after being turned off by one guy I'm apt to be very negative to the next and yet for all I know he may be just the one I really want to meet.
The fact is that is that women are scared and men are confused and I don't see a way out of it". It was pretty hard to start a relationship with somebody who doesn't give you a chance to talk, I observed petulantly. Just then Ralston Farina arrived with a friend and glibly opined that Women's Lib was declining as a force with the realization that it had been mostly bolstered by older women who sought an excuse for not having orgasms. Anyway, as we all agreed, women seemed to have given up on sex for the moment and Ralston added: "It's easy to get along with them as long as you keep the discussion up in the air and don't suggest anything that remotely resembles a landing pattern". Gloria, who'd just joined us , was furious when she heard this and called us all of bunch of male chauvinists. Thursday, July 22: Somebody asked what the old Village had been like and I recalled that in the Fifties it had been much quieter but even then everybody that talked about how much better it was in the good old days. "These are the good old days" said Wavy Gravy who had stopped by after making appearances promoting his 'Nobody For President' campaign ("Nobody will get all the votes" he predicted). In those good old days Wavy Gravy was Hugh Romney who played the Bleecker Street cafes for a share of what customers dropped in the basket. Since then he's turned into a clown, the wise fool of historical tradition, who always has more wisdom than he's given credit for. "A clown can be as provocative as he likes' said Hugh, "Try dressing up as a clown and see what you can do. Nobody hits a clown, man. Nobody". Ralston was monitoring the passers-by, the flotsam and jetsam of a Village evening. Maybe the good old days really had gone forever, he suggested. "Everybody is so shallow today. No one reads or listens to classical music or has any depth. Even in Soho nobody knows anything about poetry". I quoted something I had once read to the effect that the previous generation was brought up on movies, on immense images larger than life, whereas today we watched television where everything was in a little box and smaller than life and thus less impressive. This lead into a general discussion of what had made Greenwich Village bohemian in the first place--what had brought all the artists with their beads and berets. It seemed to me that all the publicity about Paris in the Thirties had finally come back home and the Village had benefited from America's need to have a bona fide bohemia of its own. Just then everybody attention was diverted by a seven-foot man walking by and the subject shifted to basketball. "Are the players always tall?" I asked. "Are there short basketball teams somewhere?" Friday, July 23: Howard Smith came in tonight and we exchanged waves across the room. I first took him over to the Voice to introduce him as potential contributor and when I quit in 1966 he replaced me as columnist but when I ran into him a year or two later and observed that as he had started plugging underground papers, he might like to mention Other Scenes sometime. He had looked me in the eye and said: "I would never mention you in my column or anything you did. The way you treated Ed and Dan was disgraceful and they said they were well rid of you and your claims to have been a cofounder". I was dumb-founded. "Howard", I said, "what brought this on? I've known you for years and you never indicated you disliked me". Saturday, July 24: Peter Frank borrowed my pen to annotate a statement he'd just noticed on the men's room wall; WHEN TRUTH HAS GONE FROM ART IT HAS GONE FOREVER--R. Farina. Peter wrote underneath: "Oh, Ralston, stop quoting yourself". When Ralston arrived a few minutes later (Peter had left by then) he erased the addenda and said: "Well, some-body once called Peter Frank the Alfred E. Neuman of the art world". Lenny suggested that maybe "the Woody Allen of the art world" would have been more accurate but Ralston stood by his original evaluation. Of course we started arguing about what art was (again) and Ralston said: "Well, it certainly isn't theatre". I suggested that our notions of theatre had changed a lot since the Happenings of the previous decade and added that the only theatre I enjoyed these days was what was happening on the corner right in front of us. Gloria, who didn't usually say much, asked Ralston what kind of art it was he did. "My medium" Ralston said, "is time. All of my discipline, my meditation goes into painting the dragon-- all but the eye, which I paint last. When I paint in that final eye the dragon flies away. That's what I try to explore. Only artists see the whirr of the wings, the blurred lines of the dragon in flight. The public sees the nest it made for itself". I didn't quite understand that but I liked the way he said it and it reminded me of the only artwork of his that I had ever seen. He'd instructed everybody to meet in the Fine Arts Gallery at precisely 6pm to watch his creation. On the stroke of six, Ralston had come in bearing one of those plastic gardening sprays and shot a fine, filmy mist of water over a series of blank canvases on the wall. As the moisture hit the canvas, an obviously pre-painted Japanese hieroglyphic surfaced, disappearing again when the water dried. It was impressive and I told everyone about it. Sunday, July 25: Back onto the subject of the war between men and women today with Ralston maintaining that it was like "Lysistrata without the war". Men, he declared, were at all times merely obeying natural impulses that couldn't be changed or controlled. And women held it against them. My own feeling, I said, was that society still suffers from the mass sexual frustration that's a holdover from the days when women were wary of fucking for fear of getting pregnant and although the arrival of the pill invalidated that attitude to some extent it also coincided with women's increased awareness of the way they had always been sexually exploited. I was talking about pickups and new relations--or would-be relationships--rather than men and women who already knew each other. At least seven of us were gathered around a tiny table outside the front door and it seemed like everybody who came by was known to at least one or two of us; it was like a giant party. Bob Patterson was at the next table, it being the first time I'd seen him since he wrote me a story for EVO about the guilty excitement to be derived from fucking 15-year-old girls. It was skillfully written, more like a sociological report than a confession, but to play safe I gave him an academic byline--Dr Robert Patterson. Judging by today's climate, of course, 15-year-olds are veterans and he'd have to write about 10-year-olds to have the same impact. One of the passers-by was Maurice, the bearded veteran who has prowled Village streets for 20 years selling old magazines. I persuaded Gene to tease him a little. Gene: "Maurice, is it true that you have $200,000 secretly hidden away somewhere in a parcel locker?" Maurice: "I don't want to discuss that". Lenny remarked that the difference between today's Figaro and the old one was that nobody sat around stoned in the old days. At this Bob got very indignant and said that lots of people used to deal out of the Figaro. And today? I asked. Bob smiled ruefully. "It would be nice to find some right now". (New York is undergoing its annual pre-harvest famine). Rona said she'd been talking to somebody here yesterday who'd recalled that most of the dealing took place in the garden, which had trees at that time. There was sawdust on the floor of the basement where they used to show WC Fields movies. Jane remarked that she was so innocent in those days that she used to sit around, get picked up by men and not know what to do when they took her home. "I'd end up jerking them off", she said, "because I didn't know about sex and I was too scared to find out". Well, added Gloria, the Figaro used to really intimidate her. "I was new to New York and I thought all these people around me must be so sophisticated and knowledgeable. I often look at the young girls sitting around today and wonder if they feel as I did then". Later that day: I couldn't believe we were all blabbering about 'What is Art?' again, just as we did all through the Sixties. I said: "I think it would be beneficial if all the world's master-pieces were sold to the highest bidders and replaced in museums by first-rate copies". Experts were often unable to tell the difference, I pointed out, and as the main purpose of museums is to be educational, the only effect would be to produce millions of dollars that could be used to enhance art, and possibly poor artists, in various ways. Not only that but the new owners would then take over all insurance costs and be extremely vigilant about security to protect their investment. It's a provocative argument that I've made before, always to outraged protests, and this time was no exception. Ralston and Lenny could not wait to interrupt each other by blustering about how true works of art have "presence" and "essence" and all that other bullshit. To which I retorted that it was only when you were told the value of something that you became awed by its mystique. I mentioned the time I'd met the curator of some tiny museum in the Midwest and he'd explained how the only 'intelligent' way to utilize his small budget was to specialize, in his case on the Dutch painters of the late 18th century or some similarly limited category. The result was that he had a valuable collection that covered about .0001 per cent of art history and the local community that patronized his museum learned virtually nothing about art in general. Monday, July 26: Could Gerald Ford actually make it to the White House with--of all people--John Conally? The papers I brought in with me to read are full of the two of them schmoozing on the White House lawn. If this Texan gets into the White House it will make the fourth crooked vice president we've had in a row. True, Rockefeller and Connally have not actually been convicted but most people I know think of them as crooks. I was still musing over this when a familiar face, name unknown, came by and sat down to reminisce about "the old days". Once fellow-customers we find ourselves again exchanging amiable banalities a decade later. One of the only advantages of getting older is the opportunity that pops up occasionally to get deeper into a relationship that never previously got off the ground and so it was this time. One thing led to another and we not only ended up in bed but found ourselves entangled in a hot and heavy relationship that was pressure-cooked by the knowledge that it could only last three weeks, after which she would be sailing off to Morocco. It was interesting to speculate whether, had we not had this deadline hovering over us, it might have merely been a one-night stand. It made we wonder whether new relationships might not benefit by having an initial cut-off point, to be resumed at some later date. My experience is that when I run into women who were so popular last time we met that they wouldn't even give me the time of the day they are now more sympathetic to my advances--older, perhaps not so much in demand and flattered to find that I admire them as much as the last time around. Of course, I'm more mellow myself and that surely counts for something. Tuesday, July 27: Today I finally went to see Jack Klein, notorious Soho landlord with whom I'd been negotiating to find an apartment. After reading a piece about him in the Soho Weekly News which described how he refused to let his tenants profiteer over key money he sounded like my kind of guy. For some reason I like to know my landlord personally. Klein showed me a tiny L-shaped loft in his West Broadway building which at first I agreed to take but, thinking it over later, decided that $400 was a bit excessive for one room and called him up to tell him so. "Apparently he doesn't approve of people making excess profits unless it's him" Gloria said, when I recounted the incident. Then she told me that the Figaro's new landlord was a bit of a rip-off himself back in the early days. "A typical Mr. Landlord" was how she described him and described his reluctance to make repairs and paint. "In 1965 he weighed a lot more than he does now, maybe 40 or 50 pounds more. He was all-businessman in a grey suit and I'd see him wandering up and down Thompson street in a dream world. One day he wore an orange tie with his grey suit and it made me laugh because I could see the split in his personality, wanting to break out of the jail of his grey suit. In the early '70s he sold the building and when I saw him again he didn't remember me. The guy across the street is great friends with him. they talk about girls together and joke a lot so I guess he's a different person now. Anyway, he must have gone to a shrink; his whole aura is different".
Wednesday, July 28: It was well after midnight when I arrived and Robin told me to sit outside with Joey Skaggs, fresh from the triumphal staging of his semen bank hoax for Alex Bennet's cable TV show. Elizabeth was just leaving, escorted by somebody into a taxi (is that her Mafia friend?) and whispered that she'd tell me tomorrow about her disastrous date of the previous night. Robin, just finishing her shift, came to sit with us under the guise of refilling the ketchup bottles. It quickly became obvious that she's just started making it with Joey—godammit, missed her again after waiting all these years. A young woman who looked about 21 stopped by to ask if somebody would come with her to take a swim in the Carmine Street pool. "You have to climb over the fence at night" she explained, "and I don't want to go alone". When we got there a bunch of kids with the same idea were just being evicted by cops from a patrol car but we walked round the block and returned in time for my companion to strip down to her swimsuit and do three lengths without incident. Back at the Figaro it was now 2am and Robin was talking to Stanley Fisher who was surrounded by his usual batch of women groupies. Joey nudged me. "Isn't that the guy who's always into orgies?" he asked. "I hate the bastard; he's a real mind-fucker". I had always been wary of him myself, recalling his Great Fear Press which had propagated the notion that the fear of this planet colliding with a meteorite was the basis of every human's insecurities. I remember thinking at the time that such a paranoia had never entered my mind until then but that once aware of it, the logic was persuasive.
Fisher once screened his movie at Cinematheque which caused an uproar. I don't remember anything about it except how angry people got, booing and whistling for it to be stopped. It struck me as odd that anybody could arouse so much animosity with such relatively nondescript images and now I was inclined to think of it as negative energy or, if you like, black magic. Ken Russell's movies affect some people the same way. Before I said anything, however, Joey was up from his seat and over at Fisher's table arguing and yelling. "I've never seen you so angry" Robin told him when we all sat down again. It seems that Fisher's technique, and that of his lady acolytes, is to zero in on whatever insecurities or vibrations they detect and go immediately on the offensive with comments like, "Why are you so nervous?" Robin, always cool and smiling, was able to handle it but Joey lost his cool and accused Fisher of being "another Charles Manson". When he calmed down, he admitted it was probably jealousy. He and Fisher had once lived in the same building at 521 Hudson Street and Fisher, he said, had always been coming on to his old lady in the hall. Now it was eight years later and a repeat performance. Robin said it had been an eventful night because Ken Van Sickle, an earlier lover of hers, had been chatting up Janet, the blonde surfer waitress, and Janet's father--who was always dropping by to keep an eye on his dishy daughter--had come on to her. "I think of Janet as a young version of myself, just like I was when the Figaro began", Robin said. "So it seemed that somehow we'd completed a whole circle".
Aug 12, 1978: The solar kid had invited me to his Broome Street party and there he was, four red lights winking from his T-shirt at one-second intervals. In his hand, activated by a concealed chip, a tiny pyramid glowed at the same frequency. Punk influence had taken over one noisy end of the party while nearer to the bar people sat around on cushions or low couches & tried to converse over the still-too-loud music. I drew Lenny’s attention to a stylish lady who seemed a mass of dangling items. “Cheap pseudo-Cuban flash” he sneered, or something to that effect. As I left he was deep in conversation with her. The party at Broadway & Houston Street was bright, an air of gaiety with happy attractive faces, good lighting & lots of lovely ladies. I smiled across the kitchen table at a pert, art flirt type with a belly swelled by pregnancy. She was sitting under the fan on a raised part of the floor and gradually making my way around the room I eased into the seat below her. Our conversation was brittle & snappy. She was the gets-her-own-way JAP type who always seems to turn my head & although she didn’t appear to have a husband or lover in the offing I assumed there must be one. The more interesting and animated our chat, the further down she slipped until eventually she was reclining full length upon the floor, gazing up at me and laughing a lot. Enchanting. Eventually she said she wanted to dance but I said I’d pass. I rarely dance in any case & the idea of that baby bobbing up & down in her belly made me nervous. So she split & danced. A friend said later: “She’s bad news, a bit weird & always looking for a good-looking dude who’ll keep her.” All he had done was to make her sound even more attractive than before. Except for the baby, nach. That kind of responsibility is enough to cool anybody. But what am I—what is anybody—looking for? Relationships are so confusing these days, which may be why everybody seems to talk about them ad infinitum. Of course, Soho is the last place to seek a partner who has any sense of commitment, loyalty or continuity. Most of the women seem so liberated, that the idea of actually building up a relationship, i.e. having two consecutive dates with the same person, is probably sacrilegious to their current creed. So if I want to get married again (unfashionable) or even have what we might term “an old-fashioned relationship”, I’ll have to start looking elsewhere. My demands are actually quite modest; an intelligent, rational, easy-going woman who likes my company & isn’t always searching for somebody else. I enjoy getting into long, stimulating conversations with attractive ladies, but I’m too easily enchanted. I ponder too much on how to be funny, how to make them smile & hug me & invite me over to share their bed & board for long, glorious hours of togetherness. Romantic, that’s me. Women are fascinating to talk to about relationships except when it comes to fucking. In my unfortunate experience these days, most women appear to seek a man who’ll fulfill all the regular functions of a lover except for the sex. They want to be admired, to be wooed, to be escorted, consoled, and even paid for. And after all that they ask, “Why does sex have to enter in & spoil it? Why can’t we just be friends?” I’ve been hearing that line for about 20 years & I still don’t have an answer for it. In my opinion, fucking with friends is one of the best things in life. Only a woman could suggest that NOT fucking friends could be an improvement. But then if I’m to believe everything I hear, women these days get harassed with sexual offers from morning until night; only the supremely confident man can persuade somebody he’s just me, that he is more desirable than all the others. Estela says: “You’ve got to give any woman some really good reason why she should want to fuck you. Otherwise why should she bother?” If she is right it’s a depressing prospect. My trouble is that often I don’t know how to interpret the signals; even if I’m correct in assuming that they are signals. The other night on the subway—of all places—it seemed that a certain lovely stranger returned my interested gaze. She got up to stand by the door long before her stop so I followed her off & all the way through the station. But I chickened out just when I should have said something to her. Shyness, fear, an inability to take the bull by the horns, to grasp the nettle, whatever. One thing I’ve noticed lately is that this batch of Colombian tends to make me a bit paranoid, but by the same token it encourages constant Alice-in Wonderland trips, a series of scenes, merging, succeeding & adding to everything a more-than-normal quotient of drama. It’s easy to be the dispassionate observer in a succession of plots in which everybody assumes significant dimensions. Later at the party I’m sat against the wall on the floor when a woman comes to stand right in front of me, her male companion to the left. She doesn’t give me so much as a glance but her ass is about 12 inches from my face. She shifts her foot, grinding her heel into my shoe. She scratches her ass and opens & closes the fingers of her hand so that it almost touches my nose. My mind races furiously. Does she know what she is doing? I feel I should respond in some way, but how? It would be so easy to stroke her leg, leaving her partner, blissfully ignorant of what’s happening. Is that what she wants? Those marvelously ambiguous situations on buses when arm & arm touch and stay together are so much easier to deal with. Affairs, which are not only not consummated but not even officially acknowledged by either party. It’s probably cowardly not to follow through but, of course, there is always the chance that you’ll guess wrong. If there is any lesson that I’ve learned lately, it’s that if we always act on our assumptions even the best of us is only right about half of the time. Anyway, I goofed again. Whatever I did would probably have been wrong. She may have meant nothing (in which case why did she stand so close?) or she may have hoped I’d do something just for the pleasure of the subsequent scene (like her man beating me up, for example). What I did was to touch her leg lightly & offer them both some of the joint. She looked at me like I was definitely a schmuck, declined & moved away. What the dilemma usually boils down to is how angry with myself I’ll be later after the occasions when I don’t act. Janet Wolfe was telling me the other day that she’s giving a class on assertiveness for men next fall. I will definitely be among the pupils in that seminar. The accepted wisdom these days is that with all that sex around—in movies, magazines, everywhere you go—that to complain about not getting enough is to mark oneself as a bumbling incompetent, undoubtedly suffering from halitosis, trichinosis, plus all the other ills the flesh can be heir to. Not to mention the mind. Well, I’m not getting enough. A certain hairless lady I met last week (that bizarre mag, The Razor’s Edge, had paid her $500 to shave her head), affected the usual show of surprised exasperation when I made a pass at her. She had hoped, she said primly, that this might have been one occasion when she didn’t have to deal with that. I refrained from saying that was exactly the way I felt myself. What I’m really getting tired of is the way all these women just keep wanting me for one thing—my mind. August 19 If rumor is correct, the Owen Morell sculpture atop Tribeca’s American Thread building is costing thousands of dollars in monthly rent, all paid for by grants which must work out to about $500 per viewer considering how few people have been up to inspect it. A good place for a party, you’d imagine, although nobody has yet suggested it. In fact there just aren’t any parties right now and the few artists remaining in Soho are getting more desperate each week. The Saturday night ‘circuit’ members exchange frantic phone calls, settling with gratitude for news of gatherings as far as (shudder!) First Avenue and other such hitherto unthinkable locations as Riverside Drive or Brooklyn Heights. But although Manhattan social life has hit a summer slump there is plenty of planning going on in other spheres. in the wonderful world of small-time publishing, for example, a dozen new papers or magazines are gearing up for a fall debut. Most of these are in that strata of the market presently dominated by the Village Voice and, to a lesser extent, by the lackluster Soho News, both of which are vulnerable to some effective competition. For many years the Voice has drawn the bulk of its audience from (1) out-of-towners who think they’re learning about hip life in the big city; (2) readers who need the classifieds or theater listings; and (3) political groupies. Hardening of the Voice’s arteries set in long ago, exacerbated by Clay Felker’s failed attempt to take it national. The Soho Weekly News is now reportedly about to become the property of Brit press lord Vere Harmsworth, who already owns part of it, and who is said to be planning a coast-to-coast media empire. Despite parochial prominence, supermarket heir Michael Goldstein has garnered a mere 15,000 circulation after four years of highly publicized operations in Soho but if the current daily paper strike continues he can expect circulation to zoom along with more ad-rich issues like this week’s 100-pager. Clearly there’s room for half a dozen general interest weeklies in New York and within the next few years that’s what we can expect to see. Offset printing, once the sole province of the ‘undergrounds’ has become respectable and the relative cheapness of tabloid production is further enhanced by fairly small circulations proving attractive to advertisers. All those teenagers who used to buy rock papers a decade ago have now grown up and what were once sex papers have blossomed into four-color glossy mags. So the outlook for low-cost publishing is promising. Rex Weiner’s Reliable Sources could emerge as a New York equivalent to London’s gossipy Private Eye; Leon Garry is almost ready with two ‘consumer tabloids’; an art-and-culture paper called New York Eye is on the boards and there are others it would be premature to mention. The publishers of the lively, new Fire Island Tide could be tempted to try to repeat their success in Manhattan although Dan Rattiner, with a string of Dan’s Papers out in the Hamptons, professes to be happy staying right where he is. His nine papers distribute 70,000 copies a week in summer and in winter Dan (an early investor in the East Village Other) likes to travel and take it easy. Yesterday I was on hand at Brattleboro, VT, to watch the first issue of Jim Buckley’s The National Opener comes off the presses, a breezy tabloid he tags “a thinking man’s National Enquirer”. The last paper Jim started, a decade ago, was Screw, a concept so radical that some of the media—especially TV—which reported on it couldn’t bring themselves to mention its name, and it was always a mystery why the hooker sheet was never busted for pandering. TNO, not as radical as that, does represent a new departure for a tabloid in that its content is aimed at a reasonably intelligent articulate audience instead of the curlers and Geritol crowd. The paper, as its publisher announced editorially, is “an eclectic compilation of news from around the world, aimed mainly at those of you who want to read something short but don’t want your intelligence insulted while you’re doing it”. Since Buckley sold his share of Screw to Al Goldstein, he’s been hanging out in a pricey house (sex publishing pays off) and making occasional movies, but mostly planning a publishing comeback. On the drive home, we talked about the first issue which was of the style and format at which he said he was aiming. “As long as it’s got 72-pt heads and is about 50% graphics, I’ll like it,” I said. Which is pretty much how it turned out to be. It’s an imaginative extension of what used to be the most interesting pages in Screw: a successive patchwork of jigsaw puzzle-like collaged pages. Nothing over 100 words and barely a story unaccompanied by a picture. Its ephemeral writing style is engagingly cheeky, yet shrewd. Sex comprises about 20 per cent of the content, a sensible proportion considering how interesting are so many other subjects. I liked TNO immediately and think Jim has a winner. [Footnote in 2007: My enthusiasm was short-lived. After agreeing we’d work together on this new paper, Jim met some smug asshole who offered to give him money for a half-share as long as I was dumped. Greed, as you will again see later, always being the paramount thing in Jim’s mind, I was dumped. TNO lasted one issue]
Party Circuit, ======================================= |
||||||||||||||||||||
