I was always hungry. I metabolized my food quickly. Robert could go without eating much longer than me. If we were out of money we just didn’t eat. Robert might be able to function, even if he got a little shaky, but I would feel like I was going to pass out. One drizzly afternoon I had a hankering for one of those cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches. I went through our belongings and found exactly fifty-five cents, slipped on my gray trench coat and Mayakovsky cap, and headed to the Automat.
I got my tray and slipped in my coins but the window wouldn’t open. I tried again without luck and then I noticed the price had gone up to sixty-five cents. I was disappointed, to say the least, when I heard a voice say, “Can I help?”
I turned around and it was Allen Ginsberg. We had never met but there was no mistaking the face of one of our great poets and activists. I looked into those intense dark eyes punctuated by his dark curly beard and just nodded. Allen added the extra dime and also stood me to a cup of coffee. I wordlessly followed him to his table, and then plowed into the sandwich.
Allen introduced himself. He was talking about Walt Whitman and I mentioned I was raised near Camden, where Whitman was buried, when he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Are you a girl?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”
He just laughed. “I’m sorry. I took you for a very pretty boy.”
I got the picture immediately.
“Well, does this mean I return the sandwich?”
“No, enjoy it. It was my mistake.”
He told me he was writing a long elegy for Jack Kerouac, who had recently passed away. “Three days after Rimbaud’s birthday,” I said. I shook his hand and we parted company.
Sometime later Allen became my good friend and teacher. We often reminisced about our first encounter and he once asked how I would describe how we met. “I would say you fed me when I was hungry,” I told him. And he did.
Our room was getting cluttered. It now contained not only our portfolios, books, and clothes, but the supplies Robert had stored in Bruce Rudow’s room: chicken wire, gauze, spools of rope, spray cans, glues, Masonite board, wallpaper rolls, bathroom tiles, linoleum, and piles of vintage men’s magazines. He could never throw any of it away. He was using male subject matter in a way that I had never seen, cuttings from magazines he had gotten from Forty-second Street integrated in collages with intersecting lines that served as visual pulleys.
I asked him why he just didn’t take his own pictures. “Oh, it’s so much trouble,” he’d say. “I can’t be bothered and the printing would cost too much money.” He had taken photographs at Pratt, but was too impatient with the time-consuming process of the darkroom.
Meanwhile, searching out male magazines was its own ordeal. I would stay in the front looking for Colin Wilson paperbacks, and Robert would go in the back. It felt a little scary, as if we were doing something wrong. The guys running those places were grouchy, and if you opened a sealed magazine you had to buy it.
These transactions made Robert edgy. The magazines were expensive, five dollars apiece, and he was always taking a chance on the contents. When he would finally choose one we’d hurry back to the hotel. Robert would unseal the cellophane with the expectation of Charlie peeling back the foil of a chocolate bar in hopes of finding a golden ticket. Robert likened it to when he ordered grab bag packages from the back covers of comic books, sending for them without telling his parents. He would watch for the mail to intercept them, and take his treasure to the bathroom, where he would lock the door, open the box, and spread out magic tricks, X-ray glasses, and miniature sea horses.
Sometimes he’d luck out and there would be several images he could use in an existing piece, or such a good one that it would trigger a whole new idea. But often the magazines were a disappointment and he’d toss them on the floor, frustrated and remorseful that he’d wasted our money.
Sometimes his choice of imagery mystified me, as it did in Brooklyn, but his process did not. I had made cuttings from fashion magazines to make elaborate costumes for paper dolls.
“You should take your own pictures,” I’d say.
I said that over and over.
Occasionally I took my own pictures, but had them developed at a Fotomat. I knew nothing about the darkroom. I got a glimpse of the printing process from watching Judy Linn work. Judy, having graduated from Pratt, had committed herself to photography. When I would visit her in Brooklyn, we would sometimes spend the day taking photographs, I as her model. As artist and subject we were suited for each other, because we shared the same visual references.
We drew on everything from
When I showed him Judy’s prints, Robert was amused by my personas. “Patti, you don’t smoke,” he’d say, tickling me. “Are you stealing my cigarettes?” I thought he would be annoyed, since cigarettes were expensive, but the next time I went to Judy’s, he surprised me with the last couple from his battered pack.
“I know I’m a fake smoker,” I would say, “but I’m not hurting anybody and besides I gotta enhance my image.” It was all for Jeanne Moreau.
Robert and I continued to go to Max’s late at night on our own. We eventually graduated to the back room and sat in a corner under the Dan Flavin fluorescent sculpture, washed in red light. The gatekeeper, Dorothy Dean, had taken a liking to Robert and let us pass.
Dorothy was small, black, and brilliant. She had harlequin glasses, wore classic cardigan sweater sets, and had gone to the finest schools. She stood before the entrance to the back room like an Abyssinian priest guarding the Ark. No one got past her unless she approved. Robert responded to her acid tongue and acerbic sense of humor. She and I stayed out of each other’s way.
I knew that Max’s was important to Robert. He was so supportive of my work that I could not refuse him this nightly ritual.
Mickey Ruskin allowed us to sit for hours nursing coffee and Coca-Colas and hardly ordering a thing. Some nights were totally dead. We would walk home exhausted and Robert would say we were never going back. Other nights were desperately animated, a dark cabaret infused with the manic energy of thirties Berlin. Screaming catfights erupted between frustrated actresses and indignant drag queens. They all seemed as if they were auditioning for a phantom, and that phantom was Andy Warhol. I wondered if he cared about them at all.
One such night, Danny Fields came over and invited us to sit at the round table. This single gesture afforded us a trial residency, which was an important step for Robert. He was elegant in his response. He just nodded and led me to the table. He didn’t reveal at all how much it meant to him. For Danny’s thoughtfulness toward us I have always been grateful.
Robert was at ease because, at last, he was where he wanted to be. I can’t say I felt comfortable at all. The girls were pretty but brutal, perhaps because there seemed a low percentage of interested males. I could tell they tolerated me and were attracted to Robert. He was as much their target as their inner circle was his. It seemed as if they were all after him, male and female, but at the time Robert was motivated by ambition, not sex.
He was elated with clearing this small yet monumental hurdle. But privately I thought that the round table, even at the best of times, was innately doomed. Disbanded by Andy, banded by us, no doubt to be disbanded again to accommodate the next scene.
I looked around at everyone bathed in the blood light of the back room. Dan Flavin had conceived his installation in response to the mounting death toll of the war in Vietnam. No one in the back room was slated to die in Vietnam, though few would survive the cruel plagues of a generation.
I thought I could hear the voice of Tim Hardin singing “Black Sheep Boy” as I returned with our laundry. Robert had gotten paid for a moving job with an old record player and had put on our favorite album. It was his surprise for me. We hadn’t had a record player since Hall Street.
It was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Though autumn was ending, it was a bright Indian summer kind of day. I had gathered up our laundry, slipped on an old cotton dress, wool stockings, and a thick sweater, and headed
