floor, and a speeding Edie Sedgwick was said to have set her room on fire while gluing on her thick false eyelashes by candlelight.
So many had written, conversed, and convulsed in these Victorian dollhouse rooms. So many skirts had swished these worn marble stairs. So many transient souls had espoused, made a mark, and succumbed here. I sniffed out their spirits as I silently scurried from floor to floor, longing for discourse with a gone procession of smoking caterpillars.
Harry zeroed in on me with his mock, menacing stare. I started laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because it tickles.”
“You can feel that?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Fascinating!”
Occasionally Robert entered the game. Harry would try to stare him down, saying things like, “Your eyes are incredibly green!” A staring match could last for several minutes, but Robert’s stoic side always won out. Harry would never admit Robert won. He would just break away and finish a previous conversation as if the staring match never occurred. Robert would flash a knowing smile, obviously pleased.
Harry was taken with Robert but wound up with me. Often I called on Harry on my own. All his Seminole Indian skirts with delicate patchwork would be lying about. He was very particular about them, and seemed delighted to see me wear them, although he would not let me touch his hand-painted Ukrainian egg collection. He handled the eggs like they were tiny infants. They had intricate patterns akin to the skirts. He did let me play with his magic wand collection, intricately carved shaman wands wrapped in newspapers. Most were about eighteen inches long, but my favorite was the smallest, the size of a conductor’s wand, with the patina of an old rosary rubbed smooth from prayer.
Harry and I spieled simultaneously on alchemy and Charlie Patton. He was slowly piecing together hours of footage for his mystery film project based on Brecht’s
We talked about everything, ranging from the tree of life to the pituitary gland. Most of my knowledge was intuitive. I had a flexible imagination and was always ready for a game that we would play. Harry would test me with a question. The answer had to be a sliver of knowledge expanding into a lie composed of facts.
“What are you eating?”
“Kidney beans.”
“Why are you eating them?”
“To piss off Pythagoras.”
“Under the stars?”
“Out of the circle.”
It would begin simply and we would keep it going for as long as it took to get to the punch line, somewhere between a limerick and a poem, unless I tripped up and used an inappropriate reference. Harry never made mistakes, as he seemed to know something about everything, the undisputed king of information manipulation.
Harry was also an expert at string figures. If he was in a good mood he would pull a loop of string several feet long from his pocket and weave a star, a female spirit, or a one-man cat’s cradle. We all sat at his feet in the lobby like amazed children watching as his deft fingers produced evocative patterns by twisting and knotting the loop. He documented string figure patterns and their symbolic importance in hundreds of pages of notes. Harry would regale us with this precious information that regrettably none of us would grasp, as we were so mesmerized by his sleight of hand.
One time, when I was sitting in the lobby reading
Harry knew the Weiser brothers quite well and I was given the key to a glass case to examine the famous 1955 edition of
It seemed like we milled around in there for hours. Harry was gone for a long time, and we found him standing, as though transfixed, in the center of the main floor. We watched him for quite a while but he never moved. Finally, Robert, perplexed, went up to him and asked, “What are you doing?”
Harry gazed at him with the eyes of an enchanted goat. “I’m reading,” he said.
We met a lot of intriguing people at the Chelsea but somehow when I close my eyes to think of them, Harry is always the first person I see. Perhaps because he was the first person we met. But more likely because it was a magic period, and Harry believed in magic.
Robert’s great wish was to break into the world that surrounded Andy Warhol, though he had no desire to be part of his stable or to star in his movies. Robert often said he knew Andy’s game, and felt that if he could talk to him, Andy would recognize him as an equal. Although I believed he merited an audience with Andy, I felt any significant dialogue with him was unlikely, for Andy was like an eel, perfectly able to slither from any meaningful confrontation.
This mission led us to the city’s Bermuda Triangle: Brownie’s, Max’s Kansas City, and the Factory, all located within walking distance of one another. The Factory had moved from its original location on Forty-seventh Street to 33 Union Square. Brownie’s was a health food restaurant around the corner where the Warhol people ate lunch, and Max’s where they spent their nights.
Sandy Daley first accompanied us to Max’s, as we were too intimidated to go by ourselves. We didn’t know the rules and Sandy served as an elegantly dispassionate guide. The politics at Max’s were very similar to high school, except the popular people were not the cheerleaders or football heroes and the prom queen would most certainly be a he, dressed as a she, knowing more about being a she than most she’s.
Max’s Kansas City was on Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue South. It was supposedly a restaurant, though few of us actually had the money to eat there. The owner, Mickey Ruskin, was notoriously artist-friendly, even offering a free cocktail-hour buffet for those with the price of a drink. It was said that this buffet, which included Buffalo wings, kept a lot of struggling artists and drag queens alive. I never frequented it as I was working and Robert, who didn’t drink, was too proud to go.
There was a big black-and-white awning flanked by a bigger sign announcing that you were about to enter Max’s Kansas City. It was casual and sparse, adorned with large abstract pieces of art given to Mickey by artists who ran up supernatural bar tabs. Everything, save the white walls, was red: booths, tablecloths, napkins. Even their signature chickpeas were served in little red bowls. The big draw was surf and turf: steak and lobster. The back room, bathed in red light, was Robert’s objective, and the definitive target was the legendary round table that still harbored the rose-colored aura of the absent silver king.
On our first visit we only made it as far as the front section. We sat in a booth and split a salad and ate the inedible chickpeas. Robert and Sandy ordered Cokes. I had a coffee. The place was fairly dead. Sandy had experienced Max’s at the time when it was the social hub of the subterranean universe, when Andy Warhol passively reigned over the round table with his charismatic ermine queen, Edie Sedgwick. The ladies-in-waiting were beautiful, and the circulating knights were the likes of Ondine, Donald Lyons, Rauschenberg, Dali, Billy Name, Lichtenstein, Gerard Malanga, and John Chamberlain. In recent memory the round table had seated such royalty as Bob Dylan, Bob Neuwirth, Nico, Tim Buckley, Janis Joplin, Viva, and the Velvet Underground. It was as darkly glamorous as one could wish for. But running through the primary artery, the thing that ultimately accelerated their world and then took them down, was speed. Amphetamine magnified their paranoia, robbed some of their innate powers, drained their confidence, and ravaged their beauty.
