The Red Thread Read online

  He used to make me kiss him on 22nd Street and 7th Avenue when he was eating a banana.

  For Christmas I gave him a cane with an ivory wolf head on top, and he developed a limp without further ado.

  On Friday I would knock on his door and he’d come groggily to let me in before going back to bed. I’d turn on the television and get things going until finally he’d feel it was safe to get up. There were proof sheets everywhere. He shot fashion.

  By about 7, we’d be downstairs trying to get a taxi. Either I’d blow all my money or he’d blow all his money. It was the only sensible thing to do. Once when I was mortally depressed and thought about dying, Barry got a check for a thousand dollars and we spent the entire thing in one weekend on champagne cocktails. It seemed the only sensible thing to do.

  I’d run up to my horrid apartment and dump food out for the cat and run back down again and the world was our oyster. We usually went to the Koh-i-noor, an Indian restaurant on like Second Avenue and 4th Street or around there.

  “Andy Warhol’s having a party,” I’d turn over delicately. The evening lay naked before us. We could go anywhere or do anything. It was New York City.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and they’re having one at the Dakota too.”

  “Oh, boy!”

  “And Un Chien Andalou is playing.” (It was Barry’s favorite movie.)

  “Oh, well let’s go see that.”

  “O.K.”

  We’d get let out at the restaurant and go across the street and get beer to drink with the food. Ale. Ballantine. No Ranier in New York City. By the time we were halfway finished with dinner an almost unearthly sense of well-being would lift us both to the highest planes of food-gladness.

  “Ahhhhh . . .” Barry would say, leaning back and smiling.

  We never went anywhere. We’d think when we were done that we might go to Max’s, but in the end we just went back to the Chelsea and watched TV. Barry had fantastic drugs and sometimes we’d go onto the roof of the Chelsea and smoke DMT, but mostly we’d just smoke hash and watch TV for the entire weekend. Every now and then I’d go home and feed the cat.

  We were not lovers.

  Barry’s friends were mostly tied up in this agency that took fantastically New York City color photographs of things like Gleem Toothpaste. I could never be friends with them and that’s why I can’t find out where he is. I asked Tim Leary and he doesn’t know. He hasn’t heard anything about any of those people, though even the straight photographers once lived at Millbrook.

  Salvador Dalí loved Barry. Maybe he knows where he is. Anyway, Salvador Dalí speaks wretched English and Barry speaks no French or Spanish, but somehow Dalí telephoned Barry the first day he arrived in New York at the St. Regis and they managed to communicate into complete madness.

  It was Barry who made it possible for me to introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, one of my favorite things I ever did. Frank Zappa had been there always in Los Angeles and I have known him since I was about 17. He came to New York to do a record and we were walking down Madison Avenue one evening handing out “We Will Bury You” buttons that Frank had had made up of himself glowering over the top of his glasses, sitting behind a desk. The time was right.

  “Meet us at the King Cole Bar,” Barry said.

  Frank wore a monkeyskin coat that came down to his feet. Underneath that he wore pink and yellow striped pants, shoes (it was cold) and a silken jersey basketball T-shirt in neon yellow-orange. His hair curled sweetly around his narrow, pointy face. The guy at the door said he had to wear a tie.

  Frank tied it in a bow. It was silver satin and not a bow tie, and handed him one.

  Dalí took one look at Frank from across the room and rose to his feet in immediate approbation. If Frank was not for Dalí, Dalí didn’t care; he was for Frank.

  So I really had very little trouble introducing them.

  We drank chartreuse.

  Dalí said he would like to see the Mothers rehearse, which Frank was doing later on. They planned to meet at the Dom on St. Mark’s Place, which was where Frank was playing. Dalí was very anxious to see that act, as you can imagine.

  The management of the Dom was having trouble with the management of Frank Zappa and locked Frank Zappa out so that we sat on the steps, locked out, as Dalí and Gala, his wife, pulled up and got out of a taxi into the dangers of the Lower East Side.

  It was a shame.

  When it turned out positively that they weren’t going to let us in, Dalí and Gala dejectedly got another cab and went back to the St. Regis. I went to the Chelsea to find Barry and Frank went back to the Hotel Albert or wherever he was staying to argue with the fucking management who had ruined something that was very delicate and could only happen once. Dalí and Zappa alone together in a big empty room with musical instruments.

  Barry and I went drinking.

  Max’s was where everyone went to drink.

  Barry got a girl friend, one of those thin ones who looked like Holyoke or Vassar and horses. She didn’t know what I was and Barry couldn’t figure out how to explain, so we saw less of each other.

  Also, I moved in with an anarchist dealer who taught art and had red hair. He had aliases. He’s the only person I ever knew with an alias. I called him by it. I didn’t even know it was made up.

  He had red hair and a German shepherd and we talked for hours and hours and drank Wild Turkey. He had a chair which was made out of leather, an easy chair that you could lean back in, and every so often it fell over and you wound up looking at the ceiling. He thought this was a good anarchistic chair. His alias was Mike.

  I met him one morning as he was walking by with a day-old pumpkin pie he’d bought for 15 cents. He insisted I come with him and eat it, so I did in spite of the fact that he had a dog and I hate dogs. The next day I moved in. I kept my apartment for Rosie, my cat, who hated dogs even more than I did.

  Mike was a thief and a gourmet.

  I lost about 15 pounds living with him because we only ate the finest, and being around Mike got you involved in a lot of physical exercise that didn’t just come from fucking. I used to run off because he was such a shoplifter. Wine and stuff, he’d steal.

  I worked on Madison Avenue as a secretary, though I could neither type nor acquiesce to my circumstances. I hated being a secretary on Madison Avenue. I hated being put on hold and I hated waiting for elevators. My boss acted like he’d just shot meth. Always.

  He’d come in in the morning, his trench coat flapping, the door slamming open and him in mid-sentence in a voice too anxious and too loud, “Any messages, any messages? What do I have to do today? Where’s the mail? What are my appointments like? Did you do the expense account?” Shit.

  He was an ad salesman for magazines. I told him Barry was my fiancé and got a ring at the dime store. The only good thing that happened was when it snowed so hard no traffic could go up and down Madison Avenue and my boss was stuck, there was nowhere to turn. He was fat and had blue eyes like a baby and I think he thought he was crafty and maybe he was, but shit!, that “Any messages?” thing made me want to kill him.

  In February on Valentine’s Day Mike and I put a sticker heart on the German shepherd’s forehead and went to our favorite restaurant, John’s, on 12th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, I think. I realized that it was almost March, and in March I could go.

  I wondered how I was going to get all those magazines back to L.A., the main part of my life being centered around collages. It was like the white corpuscles, it staved off disaster. So I sent 90 pounds of Lifes to L.A. in a duffel bag by Greyhound Bus. It wasn’t too expensive.

  I took a cab to the airport without telling anyone but Carol and Mike that I was leaving. I didn’t want to call Barry in front of Mike. I called Barry from the airport.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked. He was working. You could hear rock-and-roll shooting music in back of him; photographers play rock and roll to shoot. Barry usually played the Stones.

/>   “I’m leaving, I am done, the year’s over,” I said.

  “Where’re you going.”

  “L.A.”

  “You didn’t say goodbye to me. Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

  “I’m at the airport.”

  “Oh . . . well, maybe I’ll come see you.”

  “You won’t. Anyway, I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  I sent him a singing telegram for his birthday. He sent me two postcards from London. And that was the end of him.

  But I just couldn’t stay in New York, though confidentially, it might be fun to go back and try and look for him. He must be around there somewhere. I should have stayed for his birthday.

  The cat, I took.

  I didn’t put in about how I testified about LSD to Teddy Kennedy in the room the McCarthy hearings were held in or about the time I woke up to someone telling me not to scream with their hand over my mouth or about how Walter Bowart had to find me an uptown job because the amount of money I was embezzling nearly floored him, but they were just stories. Everything about New York was a story.

  My friend Annie told me that when she was in New York last time she’d been doing so many things that when she finally found herself alone she decided to just take a kind of a here-and-there ramble “just to think,” she said, “you know.” Rounding the corner, she was confronted with a wino wielding a broken glass bottle, so she threw five dollars at him and ran. That always seemed like the whole thing; they’ll let you have stories, but you can’t ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.

  A PASSION IN THE DESERT

  Honoré de Balzac

  “THAT PERFORMANCE was terrifying!” she cried out as she left Monsieur Martin’s menagerie.

  She was there to contemplate the dashing performer working with his hyena, as the advertising poster put it.

  “How did he manage,” she went on, “to tame his animals to the point where he is so certain of their affection that—”

  “That accomplishment, which seems so strange to you,” I interrupted her, “is in fact something very natural.”

  “Oh!” she cried, allowing an incredulous smile to play over her lips.

  “So you think that animals have no passions?” I asked her. “Here’s proof that we can give them all the vices belonging to our stage of civilization.”

  She looked at me in astonishment.

  “But,” I continued, “seeing Monsieur Martin for the first time, I confess that, like you, I could not contain my surprise. At that time I found myself seated next to an old veteran with a missing right leg. He struck me as an impressive figure. He had one of those intrepid heads marked by war and inscribed by Napoleonic battles. That old soldier had an aura of frankness and cheer about him that always makes me favorably disposed. No doubt he was one of those unflappable troopers who laugh at a comrade’s final rictus, cheerfully strip or enshroud him, command cannonballs to be fired with dispatch, deliberate swiftly, and deal with the devil without a qualm. After paying close attention to the menagerie’s owner as he was leaving the loge, my companion pursed his lips in a gesture of mocking disdain, with the sort of pout that allows superior men to single out the gullible. And when I exclaimed at Monsieur Martin’s courage, he smiled and said to me with a knowing look, shaking his head: ‘Same old story.’

  “‘Same old story? What do you mean?’ I asked him. ‘I would be much obliged if you would explain this mystery to me.’

  “After spending several moments exchanging introductions, we went to dine at the first restaurant we came across. Over dessert, a bottle of champagne coaxed this curious old soldier to refresh his memories in all their clarity. He told me his tale and I saw that he was right to cry out, ‘Same old story!’”

  As I was seeing my companion home, she begged and pleaded with me until I agreed to write up the soldier’s confidences for her. The following day she received this episode from a saga that could be entitled “The French in Egypt.”

  •

  During the expedition undertaken in Upper Egypt by General Desaix, a soldier from Provence fell into the hands of the Maghrebis and was taken by those Arabs into the desert situated beyond the cataracts of the Nile. In order to put sufficient distance between themselves and the French army and so ensure their peace of mind, the Maghrebis undertook a forced march, stopping only at night. They made camp around a water source hidden by palm trees where they had buried provisions some time before. Having no idea that their prisoner might take it into his head to flee, they were content to bind his hands, and all went to sleep after eating a few dates and feeding their horses. When the bold man from Provence saw his enemies incapable of keeping watch over him, he used his teeth to steal a scimitar, then, employing his knees to steady the blade, he cut the cords that bound his hands and freed himself. He instantly grabbed a rifle and a dagger, provisions of dried dates, a small sack of barley, some powder and bullets, strapped on a scimitar, hopped on a horse, and headed quickly in the direction he thought the French army must have taken. Impatient to join his bivouac, he rode his already tired mount so hard that the poor animal expired, its flanks torn to shreds, leaving the Frenchman in the middle of the desert.

  After walking for some time in the sand with all the courage of an escaped convict, the soldier was forced to stop at nightfall. Despite the beauty of the sky during the Oriental night, he hadn’t the strength to continue on his way. Fortunately, he was able to climb a promontory crowned by several palm trees, whose long visible fronds had awakened the sweetest hopes in his heart. His fatigue was so great that he stretched out on a piece of granite whimsically shaped like a camp bed and slept without a thought to defend himself. He had made the sacrifice of his life. His last thought was even a regret. He repented having left the Maghrebis, whose nomadic life was beginning to please him, now that he was far from them and quite helpless.

  He woke with the sun, whose pitiless rays were falling directly on the granite and generating an unbearable heat. Now, our man from Provence had had the poor judgment to place himself on the other side from the shade projected by the verdant and majestic tops of the palm trees . . . He looked at those solitary trees and shivered! They reminded him of the elegant capitals, crowned with the long leaves, that distinguish the Saracen columns of the Arles cathedral. But after counting the palms, he cast his glance around him and felt the most terrifying despair sink deep into his soul. He saw a limitless ocean. The blackened sand of the desert extended unbroken in every direction, and it glittered like a steel blade struck by harsh light. He did not know whether this was a sea of ice or of lakes smooth as a mirror. Borne on waves, a mist of fire whirled above this moving earth. The sky was an Oriental burst of desolate purity, for it left nothing to the imagination. Sky and earth were on fire. The silence was frightening in its savage and terrible majesty. The immensity of the infinite pressed on the soul from all sides: not a cloud in the sky, not a breath of air, no undulation in the depths of the sand that shifted in small, skittering waves on the surface. Finally, the horizon ended like a sea in good weather, at a line of light as slender as the edge of a sword. The man from Provence squeezed the trunk of one of the palm trees as if it were the body of a friend; then, in the shelter of the straight, spindly shade that the tree inscribed on the granite, he wept, sitting and resting there, deeply sad as he contemplated the implacable scene that lay before him. He cried out to test his solitude. His voice, lost in the crevices of the heights, projected a thin sound into the distance that found no echo; the echo was in his heart: He was twenty-two years old, he loaded his rifle.

  “There’ll always be time enough!” he said to himself, laying the weapon of his liberation on the ground.

  Looking in turn at the black and the blue spaces around him, the soldier dreamed of France. He c
aught the delightful scent of Parisian rivulets, he remembered the cities he had passed through, the faces of his comrades, and the most trivial circumstances of his life. And his southern imagination soon conjured the stones of his dear Provence in the play of heat that undulated above the extended sheet of the desert. Fearing all the dangers of this cruel mirage, he went down the other side of the hill he had climbed the day before. He felt great joy in discovering a kind of grotto naturally carved into the gigantic crags of granite that formed the base of this small peak. The remains of a mat told him that this refuge had already been inhabited. Then, several feet farther on, he saw palm trees laden with dates. The instinct that attaches us to life awoke in his heart. He hoped to live long enough for the passage of some Maghrebis, or perhaps indeed he would soon hear the noise of cannon; for just now Bonaparte was marching through Egypt.

  Revived by this thought, the Frenchman whacked down several clusters of ripe dates whose weight seemed to bend the date palm’s branches, and as he sampled this unanticipated manna he was certain that the grotto’s inhabitant had cultivated the palm trees. The delicious, cool flesh of the date provided clear evidence of his predecessor’s labors. The man from Provence shifted unthinkingly from dark despair to an almost mad joy. He climbed back up to the top of the hill and busied himself for the rest of the day cutting down one of the infertile palm trees that had provided him with a roof the previous night. A vague memory made him think of the animals of the desert, and foreseeing that they might come to drink at the watering hole lost in the sands that appeared at the base of the rocky outcropping, he resolved to guard against their visits by putting a barrier at the door of his hermitage. Despite his enthusiasm, despite the strength he drew from his fear of being devoured as he slept, he found it impossible to cut the palm tree into several pieces in the course of the day, but he succeeded in felling it.