The Red Thread Read online

  They gave him time and enough to spare, for they remained sitting on the cool sand, not knowing what to do next, both blessing and cursing the night whose darkness provided a welcome mantle while they remained huddled on the shore, but seemed so full of menace when they thought of venturing further afield.

  Signor Melfa had advised them to disperse, but no one liked the idea of separation from the others. They had no idea how far they were from Trenton nor how long it would take them to reach it.

  They heard a distant sound of singing, very far away and unreal. “It could almost be one of our own carters,” they thought, and mused upon the way that men the world over expressed the same longings and the same griefs in their songs. But they were in America now, and the lights that twinkled beyond the immediate horizon of sand-dunes and trees were the lights of American cities.

  Two of them decided to reconnoiter. They walked in the direction of the nearest town whose lights they could see reflected in the sky. Almost immediately they came to a road. They remarked that it had a good surface, well maintained, so different from the roads back home, but to tell the truth they found it neither as wide nor as straight as they had expected. In order to avoid being seen, they walked beside the road, a few yards away from it, keeping in the trees.

  A car passed them. One of them said: “That looked just like a Fiat 600.” Another passed that looked like a Fiat 1100, and yet another. “They use our cars for fun, they buy them for their kids like we buy bicycles for ours.” Two motorcycles passed with a deafening roar. Police, without a doubt. The two congratulated themselves on having taken the precaution of staying clear of the road.

  At last they came to a roadsign. Having checked carefully in both directions, they emerged to read the lettering: SANTA CROCE CAMARINA—SCOGLITTI.

  “Santa Croce Camarina . . . I seem to have heard that name before.”

  “Right; and I’ve heard of Scoglitti, too.”

  “Perhaps one of my family used to live there, it might have been my uncle before he moved to Philadelphia. I seem to remember that he spent some time in another town before going to Philadelphia.”

  “My brother, too, lived in some other place before he settled in Brooklyn . . . I can’t remember exactly what it was called. And, of course, although we may read the name as Santa Croce Camarina or Scoglitti, we don’t know how the Americans read it, because they always pronounce words in a different way from how they’re spelled.”

  “You’re right; that’s why Italian’s so easy, you read it exactly how it’s written . . . But we can’t stay here all night, we’ll have to take a chance . . . I shall stop the next car that comes along; all I’ve got to say is ‘Trenton?’ . . . The people are more polite here . . . Even if we don’t understand what they say, they’ll point or make some kind of sign and at least we’ll know in what direction we have to go to find this blasted Trenton.”

  The Fiat 500 came round the bend in the road about twenty yards from where they stood, the driver braking when he saw them with their hands out to stop him. He drew up with an imprecation. There was little danger of a hold-up, he knew, because this was one of the quietest parts of the country, so, expecting to be asked for a lift, he opened the passenger door.

  “Trenton?” the man asked.

  “Che?” said the driver.

  “Trenton?”

  “Che trenton della madonna,” the driver exclaimed, cursing.

  The two men looked at each other, seeking the answer to the same unspoken question: Seeing that he speaks Italian, wouldn’t it be best to tell him the whole story?

  The driver slammed the car door and began to draw away. As he put his foot on the accelerator he shouted at the two men who were standing like statues: “Ubriaconi, cornuti ubriaconi, cornuti e figli di . . .” The last words were drowned by the noise of the engine.

  Silence descended once more.

  After a moment or two, the man to whom the name of Santa Croce had seemed familiar, said: “I’ve just remembered something. One year when the crops failed around our parts, my father went to Santa Croce Camarina to work during the harvest.”

  As if they had had a rug jerked out from beneath their feet, they collapsed onto the grass beside the ditch. There was, after all, no need to hurry back to the others with the news that they had landed in Sicily.

  Translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni

  NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL

  Eve Babitz

  I WENT to New York on March 6th, 1966, and left on March 5th, 1967. One year.

  Because what I was supposed to be doing was being the “office manager” of the East Village Other (an underground newspaper), I had the advantage of knowing everyone and everything at once. It wasn’t like I came from Kansas and went to work at Woolworth’s. John Wilcock (one of the founders of EVO) talked about me so much that some girl who got around started calling me “Wondercunt” before I’d even shown up, I was so famous. John had some idea that I was going to stage this party, the East Village Other April Fools Ball (or something), and he convinced Walter Bowart, the Editor, that I was just the one for the job. I have never considered having a party a job.

  When I arrived in New York, John it turns out is in Chicago, so Walter Bowart, whom I’d never met before and who didn’t believe there was such a place as California and who was suspicious of John anyway because John liked Andy Warhol and Walter thought Andy Warhol was the Death of Art, Walter put me up my first night in New York in the apartment of a friend. The friend had written speeches for Senator McCarthy and spent 5 years in jail for changing his mind. In New York, everybody was a story.

  Walter and I were born on consecutive days. We always understood each other perfectly and had a wonderful time pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes until he saw the dove of peace on acid, which was a drag. But anyway, we are friends. He’s an orphan, it was part of his story.

  The second morning he took me to Carol’s and it was love at first sight to this very day, only she’s up in San Francisco with children and I can’t stand children. Carol was perfect. She looked exactly like me, only she was black. She was from the Bronx and was a proofreader and she’d once been one of Walter’s girl friends when he tended bar at Stanley’s, a Lower East Side Bar. Carol and I took acid every chance we got.

  While I was in New York Donovan’s Sunshine Superman album came out and so did Revolver. The poet Frank O’Hara got run over on Fire Island and died.

  The party I had was one of those things where everyone who wasn’t there wishes they’d been, but actually at the time it was like a Bruegel, too sweaty and people hanging from the rafters. I invited seven bands, and since it was held in the Village Gate or whatever that place is called on Bleecker, there was only a tiny dressing room. There were seven drum sets, never mind amps. Right before the thing was to start Buzzy Linhart, who is my friend, handed me a piece of colored paper and told me to eat it, and 20 minutes later things started to get real shiny and then I was completely on acid and couldn’t handle a thing for the entire rest of the party. Carol did everything.

  LSD was not illegal in those days.

  It was all right that I was out of control because the party was completely homogeneous. Everyone knew what to do, I was pleased to observe. The seven bands played, Timothy Leary stood on that stage and gave a speech about levels of consciousness (I snickered behind my hand as he turned into Billy Graham and the rest of the room started pulsing), television cameras interfered beautifully with everything and Flexus, a group who staged happenings and from whence we have Yoko Ono and the husband who’s skipped with the kid, Tony Cox, Flexus were all dressed in overalls and had tall ladders and throughout the night they put up crepe-paper streamers in that den of iniquity like a high-school gym. Nobody saw them, it was like they were invisible. There were about 700 people there. The room fit about 500. And all those amps, TV cameras and sweaty bodies.

  “How could Bruegel stand it?” I demanded of a girl standing next to me. “How could he live?
”

  “Like this,” she said and pushed her blouse ruffle away from the inside of her wrist, where I saw a sun tattooed in every color. But just then we were dragged onto the stage under all those TV lights, and the businessmen decided there had to be a fake Slum goddess crowned. The word “Slum goddess” was Ed Sanders’ from the Fugs (he played their band), and these fat men with mustaches and cigars had decided the gimmick would be to crown a Slum goddess, so there I was holding Carol’s hand and trying to hide behind the girl with the tattooed wrist on the stage with all these lights. Buzzy Linhart, Gentleman Buzzy, strode manfully out and took the crown from the man and put it on his own head. Buzzy was shirtless and his hair stuck out a foot in every direction and it was just the right touch to give the men with cigars the slip.

  “You can ask me anything you want,” Buzzy whispered to me, “except what’s happening.”

  Buzzy played in a band called the Seventh Son or Sun and he was a vibe player and guitar player of astounding genius who, in those days, abused drugs so much that I’m surprised he’s still alive, but he is. He doesn’t even drink any more. He has a face of beauty and a soul of Olympian goodness and, boy, could he play the guitar. Everyone stole from him.

  Buzzy’s story now is that he wrote Bette Midler’s theme song.

  The girl with the tattoo turned out to be my friend. She used to have cats that would leap right through the glass of her ninth-story apartment window and live. She once told me, “Marianne Faithfull has 36 pairs of shoes and goes around barefoot. She’s the kind of a girl who is always carrying books about witchcraft, only they’re new.” This girl with the tattoo, Suzanna, wore kohl and dressed like Bip by Marcel Marceau.

  I wanted to be Slum goddess. That was the sort of Playmate of the Month the East Village Other came up with using Ed Sanders’ name. There was a girl who was supposed to be it that issue, but since I was right there in the office, I aced her out. We have been in a stage of ambivalence toward each other since that moment, and when she tried to take my boy friend away from me at a party, I was not surprised. I paid her back later. I am sure she’ll get me again someday. It’s the fortunes of war that Robin, who is a girl of enormous deadpan talent (she’s an actress, but not an L.A. kind of one), should forever be out to get me, but somehow simultaneously we have maintained what would pass as a friendship to an observer. She was more beautiful than me and should have been the Slum goddess.

  The Fugs used to rehearse every day at the Astor Theater up in Cooper Union and I used to go watch them. Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Ken Weaver and this kid named John Anderson were in that weird thing together. The only one who knew how to play really was John Anderson, and then he allowed himself to be drafted (Weaver never got over it and neither did I). Everyone said that Ed Sanders was a poet.

  I met tons of poets in New York. There are none whatsoever in L.A.

  If anyone in L.A. said they were a poet, everyone would get mildly embarrassed and go look for someone else to talk to.

  I ran into Ed Sanders when he was doing the Manson book later in L.A., and I don’t know about poetry, but prose he can write.

  When summer came, I found myself a boy friend who had air-conditioning. He was one of my favorite kinds of men—German. Is it because I’m Jewish that German accents do it to me? He was the third name. There were three names on all the material, and his was always the third—Leary, Alpert and Metzner. I cannot believe that either Timothy Leary or Richard Alpert ever got in the way of Ralph Metzner doing the hard part. They all grew to loathe each other, it seemed to me, as time went by, but they were stuck in it together because their three names were on all the papers and books. And they had to have Ralph there. The German accent gave the thing an air of authenticity you couldn’t get otherwise.

  One Friday, Ralph suggested we leave the City and go to the Country. The Country was Millbrook, the Castalia Foundation where Tim had settled into this rich-kids mansion that had about 40 rooms in it and a place called the bungalow. Somehow a Victorian mansion with Buddhas everywhere wasn’t really the Country, but it was different. Timothy Leary’s Rosemary used to cook or supervise breakfast, lunch and dinner for 35 people a day. They got crates of Velveeta cheese. Everyone smoked Pall Mall Menthols.

  The life in the Country was slow, so Ralph and I went to bed at about 10:30. At 1:00 there was a knock at the door. We were in the attic, so it was unlikely that anyone would be knocking on the door, but they were.

  “Who’s there?” Ralph asked.

  “Police.”

  The man came in with a flashlight, and I sat innocently up in bed, letting the sheet slide from my naked body and pretending I was 10.

  “Oh,” he stammered, shining the light away. He was a gentleman from Poughkeepsie who had been deputized for the raid, not a real cop. “Oh . . . I’ll be back in half an hour to search the room.”

  Which was good.

  Marya Mannes was there doing a story for McCall’s, and she had to strip for the matron. She held my hand and we got along fine. There were about 40 adults there and 4 of them got busted. The phone was suddenly out of order and no one was allowed to leave the house, so no lawyer could be telephoned until the morning from a phone booth at a gas station, though when Ralph came back the phone was working again. They were looking, those gentlemen from Poughkeepsie, for the only thing that seemed worthwhile to them—pornography. They were positive that young girls were forced to make stag movies, and when they came upon Tim Leary’s son’s darkroom, they went into completely “we were right” police seriousness. They took The Agony and the Ecstasy as part of their evidence. Nothing pornographic ever went on around that ex-Harvard professor. He wasn’t the type. What he used to do in secret was read the sports page and drink Scotch. Timothy Leary is innocent.

  Well, that was the Country. We went a few more times to testify, but the charges were dropped against the four. They busted a kid who was sleeping outside in the forest because he had about enough grass to roll half a joint. They busted a married couple who were unable to dispose of the evidence because the evidence was an attache case neatly fitted out to hold bottles in which every psychedelic known to the civilized world was contained in labeled jars. They also busted Timothy Leary and actually handcuffed him. He wore white and no shoes and looked divine. Even Marya Mannes succumbed at the moment, though later she wrote this piece in McCall’s which made me fly into a rage. They busted Tim because it was his house.

  They tried to get Rosemary to testify before a grand jury about Tim, and when she wouldn’t answer they put her in jail for a month. They were going to keep her longer, but at the end of the month Tim just kind of came and got her, smiling, and they figured . . . Rosemary was innocent.

  Because they questioned us without lawyers (which couldn’t be reached on account of the phone), they had to let everyone go. Which was lucky. That whole weekend was not very Country.

  I never liked Millbrook.

  The kid who got busted with half a joint became my dearest friend in the world and now I can’t find him and no one knows where he is and no one has even heard anything about him for about 4 years. He is the only person I know like that.

  I didn’t know him until later, months after I’d moved away from Ralph and back to my own wretched 40-dollar-a-month slanting-floor Polish–Puerto Rican home. While I was at Ralph’s they used my apartment as the headquarters of the Timothy Leary Defense Fund, and a girl, a secretary, put her cigarette out in my antique papier-mâché bird box from Persia. She was much more guilty than most people. The whole time I lived in New York I knew I was going back to L.A. so I never believed I was actually living there and never furnished my apartment with more than a bed and a chair. Once I started making collages, the magazines took over and then the place was really really ungodly, scraps all over the slanting floor, glue.

  One day Barry came down to the East Village Other because he was a photographer and thought they paid for pictures. They paid for almost nothing there, but I went bac
k to the Chelsea with him. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel on the 4th floor, so you had to take the elevator with all the old women with turquoise jewelry. The elevator was the slowest in the city of New York.

  Barry was extremely young; he was only about 21. He was from Detroit and wanted to be Avedon. He was one of my obvious inclinations; all women simply adored him. He would have adored me if I’d weighed 109 and was two inches taller. As it was, I weighed 145 and was 5' 7". I was way too fat. But I had to do something in New York, and eating seemed less evil than the other alternatives, like Bellevue or the needle.

  On Friday, I would call Barry (by this time I was working uptown as a secretary) and tell him to get up, I was coming over. Oh, he’d say, what time is it? Four, I’d say. He sometimes slept for weeks and wouldn’t go out of his room unless someone called him. Why doesn’t anyone call me or come over? he asked me once after three weeks of total divorce from the world, which had only been broken into because I thought he might like me even though I was fat. Barry, I told him, everyone loves you. It’s just that you never have any beer.

  The next time I came over five people were sitting on the floor drinking beer.

  “Do you think I should get Fritos?” he asked, worried. The young host.

  “Not unless you want them to hang around forever.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, I’ll go down and get some for you.”

  The beer was outside on the window ledge, freezing.

  On Friday I would call him and after work I’d take the subway down to the Chelsea and go and wake Barry up again. He was one of the most darling men I ever knew. His looks were all tawny and nice. He used to wear polo coats and could have worn spats. He had tawny thick hair which he didn’t wear too long and he grew a mustache so that when he smiled and you saw one front tooth was missing. It was really funny. He used to write LSD in Magic Marker on the walls of uptown elevators very neatly in small capital letters.