9745. RUDIMENTS, pt. 15

RUDIMENTS, pt. 15

(Making Cars)

I never crumbled, though I came close a

few times  -  it was a doggedness of application,

more than anything else, kept me going. I

soon realized (alas, fella') riches and fame

weren't going to be coming my way. Two

houseguests I'd never need to set table for.

There's only a small passage between the 

distant past and the today we've brought 

upon ourselves, and, like the seven sins 

of anatomy there are many differences 

in approach and in effect and these are 

things we all partake of. One night I was 

sitting around the basement at the Studio 

School by myself and in one of the little 

cubicle-like areas where I sometimes slept 

and which a long long time ago were used 

as copy and storage rooms for the Whitney 

Museum when it began there in the 1920's,

(8W8th) - a lot of the old paper and cuttings 

were still around as odd pieces of this and 

that. The colors and textures of old cut-sheet 

were paper always interesting and always 

odd and I was there one night just reading 

as I often did, (for this location afforded 

to me total privacy and solitude), and I 

came across the - to me - startling Frank 

O'Hara poem entitled 'The Day Lady Died' 

which was included in a volume called 

Lunch Poems which had been published by 

City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 

it was a poem I at first wasn't sure of and 

then after I learned what it was about and
who (Billie Holiday) was, I found totally 

caught and captured that ultra-cool New 

York hipster feeling of old - in this case 

that of the writer in the midst of all his 

usual NYC activities stumbling across 

the tabloid headline and photo of the 

announcement of Billie Holiday's 

death, and then a remembrance by the 

poet, in a completely soft and natural 

manner, of the things it conjured up for 

him and the simple memories which 

came forth, recalled as they were 

amidst all his other activities. It was a 

wonderful poem for those few minutes 

in time it took to read and think of it, and 

I reveled in that sensation too. I quote:

"It is 12:20 in New York, a Friday, three 

days after Bastille Day. Yes it is 1959, 

and I go get a shoeshine because I.......I walk 

up the muggy street beginning to sun and have 

a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly 

'New World Writing' to see what the poets in 

Ghana are doing these days...." and it goes 

on; but go look it up if you want more 

because it encapsulates what I'm saying 

and the heck with all the rest (I met Frank 

O'Hara once he was five foot seven and 

walked on his toes and stretched out his 

neck and angled his head all to look taller 

and he was quite thin and wore collegiate 

white low-cut sneakers and was quite 

homosexual too a 'charming madman' a

'whoosh of air sometimes warm and pleasant 

though sometimes so gutsy you closed your 

eyes and and brushed back the hair the whoosh 

had disarranged' - to almost quote Larry Rivers), 

and just knowing I was in the middle of all 

that at any hour elated my spirits. I guess that was

what any and all of this NYC stuff was for me. A kid

out-of-element, but damn trying. It's difficult to 

say now or to get across now the sort of strength 

and bravado this sort of thing brought to me, and 

it was almost as if I'd entered royalty in a realm 

of some new way of life. I'd met many people, 

and lodged and visited and hung about with 

many others, and I'd gone from the sorts of 

Tony Main and Andy Bonamo types to 

the austere cerebralness of Mr. Munching 

and some of the others and I'd walked and 

talked with Philip Guston and Morton Feldman,

David Hare, Charles Cajori, and Mercedes Matter.

And others too, just to namedrop,  and the 

sudden rise in feelings and a certain esteem 

all this brought forth is difficult to define 

but easy to peg - suffice it to say I GREW 

and I LEARNED, and the sorry world-ago 

from which I'd come was far behind me 

and (nearly) forgotten. None of that was

hard; but none of it was easy either.

-

I had been dwindling and I had been fading,

and it took its time before the results of that 

were clear : I had a clear and open track 

to anything I wished, and even if I wished 

for nothing that track was open too - remember 

with William Burroughs in the church at St. 

Marks in the Bouwerie; even then so early 

on I was realizing the same dream or 

something of it which I had percolated 

through my brain into reality, and as often 

as I was in a daze and essentially lost 

without direction, so then too there were

 those wonderful times where I knew 

exactly what I was doing and what 

was all about me - the incredible sound-story 

music factories into which I walked with 

the street-fair format of open serenading 

all along St. Mark's Place and the Warhol 

'Exploding Plastic Inevitable' and all 

that stuff at the 'Dom', later the 'Electric 

Circus', where people seemed stuck 

forever - both indoors and out - and there 

were times right there at the curb out 

front of that building where I'd see what 

amounted to 'families' of fellow-traveling 

hippie types immobile and totally spaced 

for one or two days and nights in a long row,

 and no one ever bothered them, and they 

used (apparently) whatever facilities they 

needed, whenever they chose. inside the 

building, and all the rest of the time they 

simply stayed there. Smoking. Eating.

Talking. Doing nothing. And although it 

seemed a quite directionless thing to be 

doing, they did it always, and to my taste 

it was distasteful having no 'place' or 

reference except that of the fifteen 

others around you, but such was what

they wanted to be about, as some form 

of fragmentation was occurring and the 

resultant society which was taking its place 

was vapid and loose as could be. Hard yet to

fathom, and hard to see. Where was the

connection? Did these people, fellow travelers,

as it were, did they really connect, besides the

physical and the apparent, did they really click

together, and make something new? Was

there a new world happening here? I wondered.

And even I, for myself, 'enjoyed' the sites - for 

these people bore no shame, nor modesty

either, and decamping to an outward city 

street in nakedness and certain lewdness 

seemed to mean nothing to them. I often 

didn't really know what I was seeing, or perhaps 

I myself was so deeply embedded in some 

myopic positioning of my own, from within 

a vast and newer inner universe, that I was 

projecting these things outward. I figured I'd 

never know, and often, at that time, my 'place' 

was east 11th Street, and just as simply any

of these people entered with me what seemed 

a fine and secure hovel, and they liked it 

as much as any but came and went until 

others took their place. I often awoke surrounded 

by strangers (thanks, Andy Bonamo), simply 

asleep or prone upon the floor and unknown 

and gone again that quickly. Food was never an 

issue, nor was much else, and it seemed they 

were always high or drugged or distant, 

(as distant as I was at least), and in the same 

way with them was the freest most strange 

climate of sexuality I'd ever imagined; difficult

here to explain again now, but what I mean 

I guess is a constant stream of coupling, 

fornicating, and changing relationships and 

partnerships with not a word ever said about 

anything. Today I look back and realize these 

were age groups of 16-25 year olds, at most,

and I am stutteringly struck by what I must 

have been witness to and only NOW do I 

know what a 'celebrity' must see and must

live as a lifestyle in the mirror. In the same 

way, these people brought their own notoriety,

by just always being 'on.' I for one made good 

note of it : forgive me if you don't know what 

I'm saying, for I really can't make it clear here.

I am dull and speechless, looking back.

 IT WAS A VAST MEDIEVAL SWARM I 

attended to, and it all seemed like a colorful,

lusty, varied, and weird, traveling carnival 

sweeping somehow over heath and meadow 

until it landed smack dab in the urban middle 

of some dying old-world city square of people 

leaving and people coming, each one without 

ever acknowledging the other.