eastern aftermath
I returned from New Delhi to London's Heathrow Airport with nothing but a small plastic shopping bag. After more than three weeks of survival on occasional cups of tea and small bowls of rice, the first real meal made me very sick and it was a long, gradual process working back to a point where I could eat much more than a bowl of soup and a bit of bread. The two Australian lesbians who had been my neighbors before the Eastern journey were at something of a loss; having me as a neighbor was not at all the same thing as having a broken-down, half-starved, very-depressed person sharing their living space. As soon as I could arrange it, I flew to Washington, DC.
If adjustment to life in London had been difficult, adjusting to the "American Way of Life" was nothing short of staggering. Anyone who has been living in cheap hotels in Old Delhi and soon thereafter finds himself in a huge American supermarket has indeed seen two extremes of life on this planet. Frances was more understanding than my two former neighbors in London, but even she had a difficult time coping with my even more difficult time coping. She finally, wisely, decided it was time to visit her sister in Pittsburgh for a few weeks and left me on my own with a well-stocked kitchen.
I somehow managed to adopt a facade capable of fooling an employment agency and was sent as a temporary clerk to one of the thousands of lobbyist organizations. That particular one did little but throw extravagant parties for its members and the lawmakers they were interested in meeting, but I was feeling too demoralized, still too depressed to care much about the niceties or ethics of the job. This, of course, made me a perfect employee so I was quickly offered a permanent job there and accepted it. Soon thereafter I also accepted the offer of an attic room in the Georgetown house of my employer, an alcoholic widower, and Frances was off the hook for a few months. My employer also had a farm with a beautiful old house in Gettysburg, overlooking the park which was once such a bloody battlefield, and the parties often were held there on long weekends. It was perhaps proof of what a shambles I was in that it took me several months to realize my employer was actually after my body. That didn't particularly bother me, but I did find his horribly repressed, roundabout way of desiring me quite repulsive. Even worse, I grew to hate working so hard to arrange the parties only to, all too often, see them disintegrate into chaos when he got too drunk to play the amiable host. So I quit the job and moved back in with Frances. Later I realized how cruel I had been to the poor man, but not until it was too late to do anything about it.
I then went slightly crazy, Frances lost patience for the first time in our long friendship and told me to leave. I took the bus to New York City and stayed awhile with Felix and his house-full of cats, then with Michael (who I had shared 80 West Cromwell Road with). One afternoon in an East Village bar, an elegantly dressed young black man struck up a conversation and after hearing a bit of my history, took out his checkbook, wrote a check for a thousand dollars and told me to use it for art supplies. He was a Harvard-educated lawyer, working with one of the more prominent firms in downtown Manhattan, and had a very pleasant apartment on the Upper West Side where I eventually moved.
When the long Labor Day weekend arrived, he asked me to go with him to Puerto Rico. We stayed at the very luxurious San Juan Hilton and on our first afternoon there made friends with a young Puerto Rican lad who we originally talked to over the fence dividing the public beach from the imported white sand of the Hilton's private waterfront area. It surprises me not a little that I cannot remember that boy's name. My lawyer friend insisted that we should take the boy back to Manhattan with us and we had a thoroughly delightful flight back in the first class lounge, enjoying it more on the return flight because of the boy's amazement over it all. I say "boy", but he was certainly in his late teens, maybe early 20s. I am not sure either of us ever asked him.
The three of us made up a very strange family, indeed. The lad was one of the most charming, inspiring people I have ever taken LSD with. His background in voodoo came to the fore and there were beautiful, gaudy shrines created in odd corners of the large apartment, strange and mysterious circles and patterns drawn with salt on the floors, delicate and ecstatic sex. The lawyer, on the other hand, responded very poorly to psychedelic drugs, became negatively obsessed with his blackness and started not only to hear voices but to carry on loud, lengthy conversations with them, a habit which continued both on and off drugs.
Eventually the Puerto Rican lad was sent home and I moved into the Chelsea Hotel. Since Virgil Thomson had spoken to Stanley Bard, the manager, about my move there, it was assumed I was just another artist down on his luck and so I was allowed to keep the large room (with kitchenette and bath) for months after I was no longer able to pay the rent. Viva, the Warhol superstar most notorious for having breast-fed her baby in a posh London hotel lobby and for her hilarious performance in Andy's "Lonesome Cowboys", lived in the room next to mine and was in similar financial straits. Once a week or more, we would make ourselves suitably presentable and go upstairs to Virgil's suite of rooms, dine and drink lavishly, and enjoy the company of men and women who were already legends in their own time. The rest of the time we would scrape by on food which someone left in the stairwell every day across from our rooms or from her income from rare modeling jobs or mine from the occasional sale of a drawing.
I saw few of the people I had known in the past in Manhattan. It was even one of the rare times when Felix withdrew from any contact. At one point, the lady of Hyde Park Gate flew over, using a ticket I had sent her, after long-distance consultations with the lawyer which I had not known about. They decided it would be in my own best interests to have me committed to Bellevue. The lawyer still had my two trunks which had been in storage in London during the Eastern trip and had only recently arrived when I left his apartment. I sat down and wrote a scathing documentary of my time with him and with her, sent them copies and sent a copy to a prominent author and art collector, letting them know I had done so. No further mention was made of Bellevue and the trunks were promptly delivered to the Chelsea.
Then I received a letter from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies telling me he was traveling to New York to conduct performances of his work at Lincoln Center, asking if the Chelsea was a congenial place to stay. I assured him it was and, with Virgil's help, made sure he was given one of the best suites in the hotel for his stay. Max said it was silly of me to be living the way I was, his London flat was going to be vacant for months because he planned to stay in his Orkney hideaway working, and I should return to London with him. So when he left, I walked out carrying bags as if I was helping him to the airport, and I never set foot in the Chelsea Hotel again. The two trunks were stored in the basement there (another tradition in that venerable hotel, where artistic guests frequently have disappeared for a time), but both were destroyed in a fire the following year.
And I was back in London again.
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