death and dog piss, and instead offered us the entire floor for thirty dollars less than our room at the Chelsea, and two months’ grace to clean and paint it. To appease the Pigman gods, I did a drawing called
It was clear we could not afford to live at the Chelsea and also take the whole floor above the Oasis Bar. I didn’t really want to leave the Chelsea, its identification with poets and writers, Harry, and our bathroom in the hall. We talked about it a lot. I would have the smaller space in the front, and he would have the back. The money we saved would pay for the utilities. I knew it was a more practical thing to do, even an exciting prospect. We would both have the space to do our work and be close to one another. But it was also very sad, especially for me. I loved living in the hotel, and I knew when we left everything would change.
“What will happen to us?” I asked.
“There will always be us,” he answered.
Robert and I had not forgotten the vow that we had exchanged in the taxi from the Allerton to the Chelsea. It was clear we were not ready to go out on our own. “I will only be a door away,” he said.
We had to scrape together every cent. We needed to raise four hundred fifty dollars, a month’s rent and a month’s deposit. Robert disappeared more than usual, making twenty dollars here and there. I had written some record reviews and was now receiving stacks of free records. After reviewing the ones I liked, I took them all down to a place in the East Village called Freebeing. They paid a dollar a record, so if I had ten records it was a good score. I actually made more selling records than writing reviews. I was hardly prolific and usually wrote pieces centered on obscure artists like Patty Waters, Clifton Chenier, or Albert Ayler. I wasn’t interested in criticizing so much as alerting people to artists they may have overlooked. Between us both we came up with the money.
I loathed packing and cleaning. Robert willingly took on this burden himself, clearing out debris, scrubbing and painting just as he had done in Brooklyn. Meanwhile my time was divided between Scribner’s and La MaMa. At night, we’d meet up at Max’s after my rehearsals. We now had the self-assurance to just plop down at the round table like veterans.
Things got better as the play officially opened, and Robert attended all the performances, often bringing his new friends. Among them was a girl named Tinkerbelle. She lived along Twenty-third Street at the London Terrace apartments, and she was a Factory girl. Robert was attracted to her lively wit, but despite her impish appearance she also possessed an extremely sharp tongue. I tolerated her barbs good-naturedly, figuring she was his version of Matthew.
It was Tinkerbelle who introduced us to David Croland. Physically David was a match for Robert, tall and slender with dark curly hair, pale skin, and deep brown eyes. He was from a good family, and had studied design at Pratt. In 1965 Andy Warhol and Susan Bottomly spotted him on the street and recruited him for films. Susan, who was known as International Velvet, was being groomed as the next Superstar, succeeding Edie Sedgwick. David had an intense affair with Susan, and when she left him in 1969 he fled to London, landing in a hotbed of film, fashion, and rock and roll.
The Scottish film director Donald Cammel took him under his wing. Cammel was at the center of this confluence of the London demimonde; he and Nicolas Roeg had just collaborated on the film
He shifted from London to Paris and arrived back in New York in early May. He stayed with Tinkerbelle at London Terrace and she was eager to introduce us all. David was likable and respected us as a couple. He loved visiting our space, calling it our art factory, and showed genuine admiration when looking at our work.
Our life seemed easier with David in it. Robert enjoyed his company and liked that David appreciated his work. It was David who got him an early, important commission, a double-page spread in
David drove a white Corvair with red interior and took us for spins around Central Park. It was the first time we had been in a car other than a taxi or my dad picking us up at the bus stop in New Jersey. David wasn’t rich but he was better off than Robert and was discreetly generous. He would take Robert out to eat and pick up the tab. Robert in turn gave him necklaces and small drawings. Theirs was a perfectly natural gravitation. David brought Robert into his world, a society he swiftly embraced.
They started spending more and more time together. I watched Robert get ready to go out as if he were a gentleman preparing for a hunt. He chose everything carefully. The colored handkerchief he would fold and tuck in his back pocket. His bracelet. His vest. And the long, slow method of combing his hair. He knew that I liked his hair a bit wild, and I knew he was not taming his curls for me.
Robert was blossoming socially. He was meeting people who crisscrossed the Factory lines, and he befriended the poet Gerard Malanga. Gerard had wielded a whip, dancing with the Velvet Underground, and exposed Robert to such places as the Pleasure Chest, a store that sold sex accessories. He also invited him to one of the most sophisticated literary salons in the city. Robert insisted that I go to one at the Dakota, at the apartment of Charles Henri Ford, who edited the highly influential magazine
I felt like I was at a relative’s for Sunday dinner. As various poets read interminable poems, I wondered if Ford wasn’t secretly wishing he were back in the salons of his youth, lorded over by Gertrude Stein and attended by the likes of Breton, Man Ray, and Djuna Barnes.
At one point in the evening he leaned over to Robert and said, “Your eyes are incredibly blue.” I thought that was pretty funny considering Robert’s eyes were famously green.
Robert’s adaptability in these social situations continued to amaze me. He had been so shy when we first met, and as he negotiated the challenging waters of Max’s, the Chelsea, the Factory, I watched him come into his own.
Our time at the Chelsea was ending. Though we would only be a few doors away from the hotel, I knew things would be different. I believed we would do more work but would lose a certain intimacy as well as our proximity to Dylan Thomas’s room. Someone else would take my station in the Chelsea lobby.
One of the last things I did at the Chelsea was to finish a present for Harry’s birthday.
He examined my gift with great interest, then immediately filed it. This being an honor and a curse, for doubtless it would disappear forever into the immense labyrinth of his archive.
He decided to play something special, a rare peyote ritual he had taped years before. He tried to thread the tape, but was having trouble with his recorder, a Wollensak reel-to-reel. “This tape is more tangled than your hair,” he said impatiently. He stared at me for a moment and went rummaging through his drawers and boxes until he unearthed a silver-and-ivory hairbrush with long pale bristles. I immediately went for it. “Don’t touch that!” he scolded. Without a word he sat in his chair and I sat at his feet. In complete silence Harry proceeded to brush all of the knots out of my hair. I wondered if the brush had belonged to his mother.
Afterward he asked me if I had any money. “No,” I said, and he pretended to be mad. But I knew Harry. He just wanted to diffuse the intimacy of the moment. Whenever you had a beautiful moment with Harry he just had to turn it upside down.
On the last day of May, Robert had a gathering of his new friends in his side of the loft. He played Motown songs on our record player and seemed so happy. The loft was several times larger than our room. We even had
