Sam loved Robert’s work, loved it like no other.
I stood with him looking at an image of white tulips that Robert had shot against a black background.
“What’s the blackest thing you’ve ever seen?” asked Sam.
“An eclipse?” I said, as if in answer to a riddle.
“No.” He pointed at the photograph. “It’s this. A black you can get lost in.”
Later Robert was inscribing the photograph to Sam. “He’s the only one who really gets it,” he said.
Robert and Sam were as close to blood as two men could be. The father sought the heir, the son the father. Sam, as the quintessential patron, had the resources, the vision, and the desire to magnify the artist. Robert was the artist he sought.
The undying affection between Robert and Sam has been prodded, misshapen, and spat out in a twisted version, perhaps interesting in a novel, but one cannot judge their relationship without an understanding of their consensual code.
Robert liked Sam’s money, and Sam liked that Robert liked his money. Were that all that motivated them, they could have easily found it elsewhere. Instead, each possessed something the other wanted and, in that way, complemented the other. Sam secretly yearned to be an artist, but he was not. Robert wanted to be rich and powerful, but he was not. By association, each tasted the other’s attributes. They were a package, so to speak. They needed each other. The patron to be magnified by the creation. The artist to create.
I saw them as two men who had a bond that could not be severed. The affirmation that came from each strengthened them. Both had stoic natures, but together they could reveal their vulnerabilities without shame, and trust each other with that knowledge. With Sam, Robert could be himself, and Sam did not judge him. Sam never tried to have Robert tone his work down, or dress differently, or pander to institutions. Shedding all else, what I felt between them was mutual tenderness.
Robert was not a voyeur. He always said that he had to be authentically involved with the work that came out of his S&M pursuits, that he wasn’t taking pictures for the sake of sensationalism, or making it his mission to help the S&M scene become more socially acceptable. He didn’t think it should be accepted, and he never felt that his underground world was for everybody.
There is no question that he enjoyed, even needed, its attractions. “It’s intoxicating,” he would say. “The power that you can have. There’s a truck line of guys that all want you, and no matter how repulsive they are, feeling that collective desire for oneself is powerful.”
Robert’s subsequent excursions into the world of S&M were sometimes bewildering and frightening to me. He couldn’t share things with me, because it was so outside our realm. Perhaps he would have if I’d wanted him to, but I really didn’t want to know. It wasn’t so much denial as it was squeamishness. His pursuits were too hard-core for me and he often did work that shocked me: the invitation with the whip shoved up his ass, a series of photographs of cords binding genitals. He was no longer using magazine images, just models and himself to produce visuals of self-inflicted pain. I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality. It was hard for me to match it with the boy I had met.
And yet when I look at Robert’s work, his subjects are not saying, Sorry, I have my cock hanging out. He’s not sorry and doesn’t want anybody else to be. He wanted his subjects to be pleased with his photographs, whether it was an S&M guy shoving nails in his dick or a glamorous socialite. He wanted all his subjects to feel confident about their exchange.
He didn’t think the work was for everybody. When he first exhibited his most hard-core photographs, they were in a portfolio marked
When I asked him what drove him to take such pictures, he said that someone had to do it, and it might as well be him. He had a privileged position for seeing acts of extreme consensual sex and his subjects trusted him. His mission was not to reveal, but to document an aspect of sexuality as art, as it had never been done before. What excited Robert the most as an artist was to produce something that no one else had done.
It didn’t change the way he was with me. But I worried about him, as at times he seemed to be driving himself into a darker, more dangerous place. At its best, our friendship was a refuge from everything, where he could hide or coil like an exhausted baby snake.
“You should sing more songs,” Robert would say when I sang him Piaf or one of the old songs we both liked. Lenny and I had a few songs and were developing a repertoire, but we felt confined. We envisioned using the poems to segue into a rhythmic pattern we could both riff on. Although we had yet to find the right person, we thought a piano would suit our style, being both percussive and melodic.
Jane Friedman gave us one of the small rooms on the floor she rented above the Victoria Theatre on Forty- fifth Street and Broadway. There was an old upright piano, and on St. Joseph’s Day, we invited a few keyboard players to see if we could find the third man. All the players were talented but didn’t fit in with our idiosyncratic ways. The best, as Scripture says, was saved for last. Richard Sohl, sent by Danny Fields, walked in the room wearing a striped boatneck shirt, rumpled linen trousers, his face half concealed behind a mane of golden curls. His beauty and laconic manner did not betray the fact that he was a gifted pianist. As he readied himself at the piano, Lenny and I looked at each other, thinking the same thing. His presence brought to mind the character of Tadzio in
“Whaddya want?” he asked casually, and proceeded to play a medley that went from Mendelssohn to Marvin Gaye to “MacArthur Park.” Richard Sohl was nineteen, classically trained, yet he possessed the simplicity of a truly confident musician who did not need to show off his knowledge. He was as happy playing a repetitive three-chord sequence as a Beethoven sonata. With Richard we were able to move seamlessly between improvisation and song. He was intuitive and inventive, able to give us a field upon which Lenny and I had the freedom to explore in a language of our own. We dubbed it “three chords merged with the power of the word.”
On the first day of spring we rehearsed with Richard for our premiere as a trio. Reno Sweeney’s had a lively, pseudo-elegant air that did not mesh with our unruly and impious performances, but it was a place to play: we were undefined and could not be defined by others. But each time we played, we found people came to see us, and their growing numbers encouraged us to keep going. Although we exasperated the manager, he was good enough to give us five nights running with Holly Woodlawn and Peter Allen.
By the end of the week, which was Palm Sunday, we two had become three, and Richard Sohl had become DNV.
The stars were lining up to enter the Ziegfeld Theatre for the glittering premiere of the film
I had often come to this area of the Bowery to visit William Burroughs, who lived a few blocks south of the club, in a place called the Bunker. It was the street of winos and they would often have fires going in large cylindrical trash cans to keep warm, to cook, or light their cigarettes. You could look down the Bowery and see these fires glowing right to William’s door, just as we did on that chilly but beautiful Easter night.
CBGB was a deep and narrow room with a bar along the right side, lit by overhanging neon signs advertising various brands of beer. The stage was low, on the left-hand side, flanked by photographic murals of turn-of-the- century bathing belles. Past the stage was a pool table, and in back was a greasy kitchen and a room where the owner, Hilly Krystal, worked and slept with his saluki, Jonathan.
The band had a ragged edge, the music erratic, angular and emotional. I liked everything about them, their spasmodic movements, the drummer’s jazz flourishes, their disjointed, orgasmic musical structures. I felt a kinship with the alien guitarist on the right. He was tall, with straw-colored hair, and his long graceful fingers wrapped around the neck of his guitar as if to strangle it. Tom Verlaine had definitely read
In between sets Tom and I did not talk of poetry but of the woods of New Jersey, the deserted beaches of Delaware, and flying saucers hovering in the western skies. It turned out that we were raised twenty minutes from one another, listened to the same records, watched the same cartoons, and both loved the
