forty-seventh street
The floor I was on at the Vanderbilt YMCA was about half occupied by permanent residents, some of whom had lived there for years. The room was very small, but eventually I had it fitted out like a luxury ship's cabin, complete with small refrigerator, large color television, good sound system and, as they arrived on the market, the newest high tech toys: the Sinclair black wedge, then the Timex Spectrum computer, Atari games console and Intellivision.
Someone there told me the United Nations was hiring extra staff for the General Assembly on a temporary contract basis, so I applied and was given a spot in the English Typing Pool. Work began in the afternoon and it was our task to take the stenographer's notes and type onto mimeograph stencils every word that was spoken at the General Assembly session. I have never waded through more tedious prose in my life and the permanent staff were as dull as the "statesmen" making their boring speeches. But the pay was excellent and there was a lot of overtime, making the paychecks even larger. After a busy day in the Assembly hall, we often worked until three or four in the morning cutting those stencils. It was also interesting seeing all the delegations in the halls, most of them wearing national costumes, and there were many musical events and other functions which were open to delegates and employees only. President Carter visited and the American staff members were invited to a reception where he thanked us for our contributions to world peace and shook our hands. It was the first time I had shaken hands with a President since Eisenhower (and he wasn't yet President when I met him and Mamie during a visit they made to the Tooele Ordnance Depot where my father was a big tamale).
I was offered a permanent job there at the end of the temporary contract, but declined the offer. I had quite a stash of money already and it was increased not long after the end of the General Assembly when Frances died and left me the proceeds from her government insurance policy.
After a short break, though, I signed on with a temp agency and was sent to a job at the office of a French investment bank where a young man named Arthur Reynolds was trying to stay afloat in the mess which had been made by his predecessor. I liked Arthur a lot, in a non-romantic sense, and probably never worked harder at any job than I did at that one. When the French directors were about to arrive on their first visit, I spent Easter Sunday in that posh office in the Seagram Building ... a fine place to watch Easter sunrise. The directors' visit had the place in a panic for more than a week before their arrival, but when they did show up, they only wanted to know one thing: how much of the florist industry on the East Coast was controlled by the Italian Mafia? Arthur looked at me, I said I'd make discreet inquiries, got on the phone and called my old friend Buddy Jones in Georgia, the first time I had talked to him in years, and passed on the information he gave me. The directors were satisfied, Arthur was terribly impressed, and I was given a permanent job there with a substantial increase in pay. I stayed in that job until Arthur left after deciding to move to London and go into business for himself. His replacement was a total jerk and I very quickly quit.
While I was working there, I started the Dada News, a xeroxed collage publication which appeared at irregular intervals, usually every two weeks or so. Eventually a number of people contributed pages for it, but most of the issues were made up of very dissimilar pages by Michael Felix Katz and myself. I even persuaded Virgil to do a page for the anniversary issue, and he simply scrawled the notes D-A-D-A with bass clef on a sheet of music paper. While it began as primarily a vehicle to promote exhibitions of artists I admired or musical events, the Dada News went on to include all and everything, weaving together current events, the American Revolution, music and art of all ages, and esoteric writings of many persuasions. It was a puzzling but handsome publication and had a small but devoted group of fans in the New York art world who would warmly welcome me when I made the rounds of galleries to hand out new issues. The inheritance from Frances financed the publication in the beginning and afterwards Felix and I took turns getting it assembled and printed. The originals were done in an 11x14 format and Felix has the complete collection; it was published on standard 8-1/2x11 paper and I believe there are a number of complete sets in various places around the world, including Honolulu where, thanks to Felix, I still have a set of them.
I continued to do drawings in addition to the work on the Dada News and other collages, sold some occasionally, but made no special effort to get things exhibited and only participated in the gallery scene when there were exhibitions by old friends or someone invited me to specific events.
There were several times during the Vanderbilt years when I seemed to suffer from that strange ailment called the "yuppie flu". For weeks, even months, I simply did not want to do anything, could not work, barely managed to get out of bed on some days. There were times when the black lawyer or Felix kept the rent paid; times so grim I survived on cheese and lunch meat pocketed at the corner supermarket. It was far worse than just mental depression; in fact, I was often not depressed at all but just had no physical energy and would sometimes sit and watch television for hours without caring what was on. There was rarely any warning when the malady would hit and no way of knowing how long it would last when it did.
In between those awful times, I worked in a wide variety of offices, had the good fortune to be given a job at Citicorp by mistake where I was expected to operate a mag card machine. I bluffed my way through it and in the process learned the machine and consequently almost doubled my earning ability. Because I knew how to operate that predecessor to the PC, I was sent to IBM when they were desperate for someone to work on the Displaywriter and my agent convinced them I could quickly learn to operate it. Those were wonderful machines for straightforward word processing, preferable in many ways to the Pentiums and software of today. That assignment led to two six-month contracts with IBM, the first working with their marketing group with the fun of testing new software, and the second in their new employee education group, working on what was a complete overhaul of their orientation materials. That was a very atypical IBM group, in the days when white shirts and dark ties were still the required uniform. The people writing the new orientation programs were long-time veterans in the corporation and were allowed to dress as casually as they pleased. It was a very good group of people to work with and was one of the most pleasurable office jobs I have had.
I fell into another "permanent" job after a long temp assignment with the advertising agency Young & Rubicam. The job involved typing, re-typing and re-typing ad infinitum the scripts for proposed commercials and we were unofficially the guinea pigs on whom new ideas were first tested. I was always very candid with my reactions, even when there wasn't much good to be said about some lame idea. I remember especially a campaign based on selling some soap powder which didn't leave "suds residue" in your clothes; I sneered at that one from start to finish. I stayed in that job for almost a year, and left to return to IBM for the second contract.
Although I had no steady love interest for a long time after Robert left for England, there was a constant parade of interesting young men staying at the Y and I had some most excellent times with some of them. I formed a close friendship with a young fellow from Colombia, of Mayan descent, and we spent many evenings together playing Intellivision games especially. When I got the Sinclair computer, he would test the programs I was learning to write, including one rather spicey one which led us to do various things depending on which path he took through a maze. It is absurd, but I created more things on that black wedge with its 16k memory than I've ever done with the more powerful machines that came later. I took it to IBM one afternoon and it was great fun seeing all the executives leave their offices to come out and marvel at that little computer, while they were stuck wondering how to sell the "PC Junior".
At some point I got very interested in Polaroid photography and bought a professional version of the camera which was capable of doing extreme close-ups. This led to a series of life-size portraits, created by photographing the subject in actual sized segments and assembling them in a grid, a series which continued for many years. I also undertook a series of dinner party photos, sometimes arranging the dinner itself and often including the same guests who were thus photographed over a period of time and in different environments.
But then an attack of that physical lassitude coincided with a period of deep depression and I decided I'd had enough of life as I was living it, gave everything but a small box of "treasures" away, bought a backpack and camping gear and set out to walk across America, humming the Dire Straits tune "Walk of Life".
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