PART I
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD IN A BIG BOMB TARGET
I’ve been told a little about my birth from my parents and sister, and then there’s what I still remember and know! It’s time to tell.
It took place in a Brooklyn, New York hospital, October 22nd, 1935. It was noon. Mom was 21 and had a beautiful slender figure with narrow hips, the kind women might pray for except when it comes to childbirth. The labor was long and painful. My mother was lying alone, neither her mother nor her husband was with her during labor. She asked a nurse for help. The nurse was annoyed and said, “Here read this magazine.” So I was stuck squeezed painfully between Mom’s slender hips trying to read a magazine.
Then they gave Mom what my sister calls ether. I’m told what was common practice at that time was the application of “twilight sleep”, insensitivity to pain without complete loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of morphine and scopolamine. So I was born drugged from a heavily drugged young woman. It was really high noon.
I remember my soft skull being pulled hard by steel tongs, bruising my head. My father saw the red mark on my head in the nursery and he said, “I hope he’s alright.” I am, in that there was no apparent lasting birth trauma, but in all the numbness and unknown dimensions of my birth my mother mostly missed the event and I’m still trying to wake up.
Many years ago when my mother’s memory was still good she swore to me that I spoke my first words when I was 9 months old. She said that she was cooking in the kitchen with me in the high-chair when she suddenly heard the words, “Be careful.” She turned and looked around thinking that maybe it was the radio, but the radio was off. Mom looked at me and then went back to cutting vegetables. Again I said, “Be careful.” Sounds like I was parroting back words she’s said to me. And given how absolutely dangerous the world has turned out to be, “Be careful” also makes for good last words
Looking at photos I can see that as a toddler I was very healthy, better than alright. I had curly platinum blond ringlets of hair and energetic blue eyes.
Once when I was crawling around the apartment I found one of Mom’s steel hairpins, with its two prongs. I noticed the electric socket nearby, with its two holes. I decided for the play of it to insert the hairpin prongs into the two holes in the electric socket. And so I did. BAM. Big electric jolt, straightening out my ringlets of hair into lines of electric radiation. I yelled and pulled back my hand. My curls couldn’t rewind for hours.
Looking back, I’m kinda glad I did it, like a little magician trying to wake himself up.
When I was four there was a big event. My mother had a baby. Mom was in the same hospital I was born in. I was staying with my grandma and grandpa across the street from where my mother and father and I lived. We got a phone call that my mother and father were coming back from the hospital with a baby girl.
We went down to the street to wait for the cab. It arrived. Grandma opened the back door gently. My mother was waiting with a little girl in her arms. My sister had wide open blue eyes looking right into my eyes. We met. We held the gaze. I had a sister, a conscious baby. There was some kind of recognition that still intrigues me.
When it was time to go to school, kindergarten, first day, I walked down the street holding hands with Peter who was holding his mother’s hand. As we walked toward the school I went head-on into a telephone pole, bang, right between the eyes, and I woke up.
After kindergarten the United States entered World War II in Europe and in Asia. I grew up with the sense of world wide tragedy, and then by 1944 there was the sense that I was living in a bomb target. My father would go out at night with a plastic helmet and a flash light in air raid drills. We kept it pitch dark inside. Sirens would sound. It was thought that German rockets and bombs might get to us, like they got London. There was a sense of death and destruction around the world. People wondered if the Germans had built the atomic bomb. It was the beginning of my insecurity. I had no future.
After the wars were over the Russians exploded atomic bombs. The New York newspapers dramatically showed New York City as an atomic bomb target. In school we were made to hide from an atomic bomb under our desks. I woke up. I was free.
EARLY SEX EDUCATION
When I was about six I was playing with friends when we saw a smaller dog with a very big penis climb onto the back of a bigger female dog, right next to where we were standing. It was amazing. I’ll never understand how he got his thing into her except that she liked it and helped him make it work. He got his big thing all the way up into her and then he started jackpumping her. Dotty, who was watching with us, had to run home for something, down the block. The little male dog just kept going, and the big bitch looked locked-in with him. It was fascinating.
Then the male dog stopped and pulled back. His red penis hung down. We watched it shrink as the bitch scratched herself and walked away. I ran fast as I could to Dotty’s house to tell her. I burst onto her porch and just as I was about to say what I saw I noticed Dotty’s mom standing there. I changed my blurt-out mid-sentence: “The small dog is shrinking! It’s half the size and getting smaller!” “What?” said Dotty’s mom, as Dotty and I ran back to see, but the dogs were gone. I knew what I said sounded absurd but it worked for the moment, and it would turn out that I’d have a gift for wild humor.
Later that summer I was standing with my uncle Ralph and Aunt Stell who at that time had a brick summer beach house a few doors down from my family’s little beach house. We were all going to the beach for the afternoon. We were in our bathing suits. Aunt Stell was wearing a two piece suit, a bra top and a little skirt bottom.
Then she said that she forgot something and turned around to go back up the 10 brick steps into her house. As she turned and started up the steps, Ralph and I turned to watch and wait for her. We both saw that she had forgotten to put on the bottom of her bathing suit under her little skirt, and Ralph and I got a great view of her private parts going up the steps, dark crevices and hair. Ralph smiled. “That’s my girl,” he said. We both smiled.
GROWING UP WITH UNPRECEDENTED DANGERS
When I was about seven, I was playing with my three year old sister on the ocean beach when a big wave came all the way up and went over us. I managed to pull myself up out of it but my little sister was gone, sucked under. I screamed and pointed. My mother came in a flash, dove into the water, and somehow saved my little sister. I got an intimate sense of how immense and dangerous the world was. I noticed in our nice neighborhood that there was fear in the streets at night. There were no gangs, but there was news of some criminal acts, again giving the sense of many dangers as the cold war continued.
One night when I was about 12 I went to bed to go to sleep and instead I woke up completely. There was nothing but awareness and vast space without time. The experience stunned me and stays with me all these years later. It feels like awareness before and after death.
MY FIRST COMIC ACT
Even though some day I would become known to be outrageous, at the age of 12 I had done almost nothing wild and my mother was the least wild person I knew. My father could tap dance well and liked to tell jokes and entertain the kids, but mom was quiet for some reasons. She could laugh but she never joked.
One day Mom and I were in a big department store in Brooklyn where I saw a charming toy. As a child I got the things most boys got, most memorably my baseball gloves, and a bike, and sister Pat did have various dolls, but in the department store we came upon a large stuffed ape that was a kind of puppet. You held it up by a leash and it walked alongside you. It was well- made, with black simulated fur and big live-looking glass eyes that seemed to follow you. My amusement with the ape was contagious, and the big toy was so cute that my mother decided to buy it just for fun. She did, and was delighted as I walked the ape out of the department store, catching smiles from everyone, all the way to where we had parked the car. I knew I’d be giving it to Pat. Stell’s rare wildness in supporting my first comic act is a sweet memory.
SPONTANEOUS ACT OF HEALING/CARE
My father was a simple man, with only a high school education, with almost no aspiration except to provide for his family. He had no confidence in his ability to communicate and kept his emotions to himself. He was a shoe salesman on the first floor of the Empire State Building until I was about 12.
Then he bought and sold used office equipment the rest of his life. He had a fast gait when he walked. He used to exhale out his stress. I remember him blowing air out sometimes, over the years, and I knew he was trying to blow off stress, unconsciously.
Once he took me with him when he went to see the doctor about something. Typically there was no talk whatsoever about why he was seeing the doctor. We were led into the doctor’s office but he was in another room at that moment. While we waited, I walked up to my father from behind and began to give him a back-scratch, something I’d never done to anyone nor had I ever seen any kind of bodywork done. He deeply appreciated it, and leaned forward so I could get to all of his back, which I did, until the doctor arrived.
I never found out what the visit to the doctor was about, but that was my first bodywork experience, and in the years to come I was to develop a bodywork practice.
I kept voluntarily doing bodywork, massage, until I got good enough so that friends who were professional bodywork practitioners – craneosacral, Swedish, and deep tissue / energy work – would trade work with me and I would pick up good practices from then. Later on, after I had various healing practice empowerments from my Tibetan lamas, I did bodywork on doctors and nurses using deep tissue massage as a basis for energetic healing work.
THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE MEDAL AND THE DOLPHINS
In elementary school I was an average student. We routinely had bomb drills in which we had to hide under our desks and cover our faces with our hands as bomb drill alarms rang. Other than that nothing really remarkable happened for me in elementary school. I did like a girl named Patricia who once showed me how she could do the split, right there on the hallway floor, wearing a short skirt. She sat next to me in class. I was starting to learn girls.
Once I put a thumb tack on her seat just as she was sitting down. She shot right back up with a little shriek. The teacher looked at me and said, “Is that you, Newman?” I said yes and got a mark for being bad. But it turns out I was good! At graduation, the last day of elementary school, something interesting happened.
While I was sitting among the boys of my class during the graduation ceremony, a couple of medals were awarded. One was the History and Civics medal. From the microphone on stage they called out, “Robert Newman”. I didn’t move. I didn’t understand. What did I do to win the award? My classmates were impatiently telling me to go up on stage. Those few seconds of suspension were remarkable. It was living theater. Really, what was happening?
That summer I had an unforgettable experience. I was floating in a rubber tube out just beyond where the waves started forming when suddenly I saw 4 or 5 sets of big dark fins headed right toward me. With no time to think I hoped it wasn’t a group of sharks and I tried to stand up on the tire to save my legs and let the threat pass under me. But in a flash they were upon me and they were dolphins! They nuzzled me a little and went by. I was stunned. Knowing how dangerous the world was I was lucky to survive, but then again, those dolphins may have been a good sign for me.
ME AND CHARLIE THE KILLER
We lived in a little house on East 22nd Street in Brooklyn all the years that I went to elementary school and then high school. A block down from where we lived Charlie Lindbaugh lived. He was too big for his age and he was mean. When he was 10 years old he killed a friend of his father with a pipe. Smashed his head. They put Charlie away for two years and then they let him out. He went to the elementary school I went to. He used to go past my house every day.
When we were both 12 years old I was making myself some breakfast when I saw Charlie out the back window, milling around in our garage. He had a rope with him. He had been pulling a rubber tire down the street and he turned into our driveway, pulling the tire into our garage, which was open, and I knew we had some loose iron pipes there. I threw open the back window and greeted Charlie: “Hi Charlie, what’s up.” He barely glanced at me and pulled his tire back out into the street. After that I kinda considered him a friend.
Later that year there was a huge snowstorm. 26 inches of snow had the doors of the house blocked. I had to climb out the back window, make it into the garage, get a shovel, dig out the side door, dig out the front door, and then go out and play in crystal wonderland. I got in a wild snowball fight with Peter and Alan, and somehow I threw a snowball at someone else walking by, and that was big bad Charlie the Killer, at least 4 inches taller and 30 pounds bigger than me. My wild snowball didn’t really hit him, but he was offended.
He came at me barehanded in slow motion trudging through the snow, and I was smiling and explaining that we were just playing, and that I was his friend. I avoided his first punch by falling sideways in the snow. Peter and Alan were shy of Charlie and held back. I stumbled backwards through the soft crystal medium as Charlie lunged forward and socked me on the arm. Then stopped. He turned and trudged away. See I told you he was my friend.
What happened to Charlie the Killer? I’m almost certain he went to Viet Nam, killed many people, and died there.
LIVENING UP DEAD QUIET
Reynolds Channel in the summer was mostly calm water, with a deep channel, as much as sixty feet deep, with a sandy bottom where there lived mainly huge inedible rock crabs. On the bottom nearer the shores, the same brown color as the bottom, with two big blue eyes searching the waters was a flatfish called a fluke. It looked much like its cousin the flounder, but with a different mouth and eyes. Fluke have a much larger mouth, with rows of small fine teeth, and they have blue grey eyes. In spring and fall there were flounders in the waters and in the summer there were enough two to five pound fluke of so that you might see up to 50 little boats drifting or anchored on the calm waters of various parts of the channel.
It was quiet fishing where people dropped their fishing lines overboard with a lead sinker and two good sized baited hooks, feeling them go down to the bottom. The bottom feeding fluke were happy with several kinds of bait, especially “killies”. Killies were live little fish two to three inches long that you bought in a little wet wood box to keep alive with water as you fished. To put a killie on the sharp fish hook, people take it in their fingers quivering and shaking with life and pull the hook through its body, watching its eyes bulge. Most often the killie shows signs of life after being hooked up. The fluke liked shrimp and clams and squid too, but the word was that live killies were the best bait for fluke, and so people used them, with a little touch of death.
One day my father and two of my uncles decided to rent a little outdoor motor boat, with me the family fishing expert to lead them out on the waters of the Channel, for some relaxing quiet fluke fishing, not using killies. I preferred long strips of opalescent fresh dead squid. It was tough and leathery and held the hook well. I was in control of the outboard motor and had us head out under the Atlantic Beach Bridge, out to where the Channel meets the ocean, exciting waters to my mind. There was no wind. It was hot July, and very pleasant out on the water. There were no radios or iphones aboard (1957).
My father and uncles were peaceful and quiet and ready to fish. I rigged everyone up with fluke hooks and strips of squid. I threw the head and insides of the squid into the water to attract fish. The water was hardly moving. We were drifting slowly back into the channel. You could hear an occasional gull cry. There were a couple of other little boats drifting nearby. There was no sign of action. Time passed. The quiet was easy and we were patient. And then bingo, I hooked a fish. Our boat livened up as I announced, “I’ve got one,” and the boats in the area were watching us in a flash. I reeled in a good sized young fluke, about two pounds, held him in my hands firmly, took the hook out of his jaw carefully. I looked him in his blue grey eyes and dropped him onto the bottom of the boat. My father and uncles were psyched. The fishing had begun!
But after a half an hour there was no more action. We were drifting slowly.
I said, “Let’s move,” and we reeled in our lines. I started the motor and guided us toward an area inside the channel where I’d been successful before. There were about 20 little boats in that area, but not because there were fish there then. We all thought it could be a good there with a shift in the water. By then the July sun was a great blaze upon us and the exceptional quiet prevailed. No one had radios, and it seemed that everyone was silent. If someone cleared their throat you could hear it 100 feet away.
Suddenly I got a great idea. As unnoticeably as possible I picked up the fluke I had caught an hour ago and hooked it back onto my line. Noticed only by one of my uncles, I slyly slid my fish over the side of the boat and back down to the bottom, him dead with his mouth open and me smiling from ear to ear. When he hit bottom I let him stay there several long seconds, enjoying the moment, and then I shouted out, shattering the silence, “I’ve got one!!” The scene transformed in a flash. My father and one uncles lit up. “He’s a fighter!” I added, pulling on my line to simulate life. Every single boat within a half mile came to life. I reeled my guy in and brought him up to reemerge from the Channel, secretly dead but wet and gleaming with sunlight. Everyone got excited and rechecked their bait and recast their lines. And only me and Uncle Lee knew what I’d done. In the next half hour there was not a sign of a fish, and soon all of the boats went home, me with the one fish and a big smile.
About a week later a nice guy we knew across the street, Gerry, asked me if I’d take him and his 7 year old son out fluke fishing if he rented a little boat.
I said sure. I took us out to where the Channel meets the ocean, and again the waters were quiet and peaceful. The little boy was snuggled excitedly next to his father. I baited their line with squid and I baited and cast my line.
We were thinking about catching nice fluke, but again the waters were very quiet, again under the July sun, again with no signs of fish. We were lulled by the pleasantness and we drifted. Suddenly there was a pull on my line. “I’ve hooked one,” I said with restraint, reeling it in. It felt like another fluke about two pounds. Gerry and his son looked down into the blue water with me intently as I brought up my catch. It didn’t feel different than a fluke, but when I brought it up out of the water it was astonishingly different.
To the horror of Gerry & son and to my surprise it was a small hammerhead shark, with a remarkably large head shaped like a double-headed hammer, with an eye at both sides, looking in all directions, and a huge mouth of big sharp teeth on the little guy. Gerry let out a scream and in a flash his son screamed with him. Sharks are easy to handle because they’re not slippery. They have sandpaper-like skin. I had seen pictures of hammerheads in books. They were a rarer kind of shark that did grow up to a thousand pounds. I was fascinated, unhooked him and tried moving him around so I could get a good look into his strange eyes, but a very anxious Gerry demanded that I get it out of the boat immediately. I let the baby creature go free back into the water so that he might slowly grow into a giant and live down below, far from the field of human anxiety on the surface of the planet.
Many years later I fished Reynolds Channel one last time. I was in my forties and was married and immersed in Buddhist studies and practice.
My parents had another little beach house not far from where we spent summers when I was young. They were away and left the house for Nancy and me to use for a couple of days. I got a bright idea. “Let’s go fishing in the channel and catch lots of fish to feed our fellow Buddhists up at the retreat center.” Nancy had never fished but thought it sounded like a practical idea, and so we rented a little motor boat and headed out into the Channel to fish.
This time the waters were alive with fluke and there were many boats in the action. I tried a drift not far from other boats and caught a good-sized fish. In a few minutes I caught another fish. Nancy seemed in the flow of it and I felt ok, more alive than when I was younger. I motored us over to a spot I used to have success at, across from the Fire Station. I checked Nancy’s line, with squid hooked on for bait, put it into the water for her, felt the sinker hit the bottom, handed her the rod to hold onto, and rebaited my line.
Again it was peaceful and quiet on the Channel, with two fluke becoming lifeless in the bottom of the boat. I tried to be insensitive. But then suddenly Nancy screamed at the top of her lungs, a blood-pumping high scream, and I saw that her rod was bent down to the water jerking wildly with life it had hooked into. I took the rod from her and reeled in her fish, which I sent gasping to join the others dying in the bottom of the boat. Nancy was finished fishing but still kind of supported me in my effort to feed many people. I caught 2 more fluke and then couldn’t stand another minute of the killing. We went home. I “cleaned” the fish, cutting off the blue eyed heads and throwing them and the guts in the garbage. I washed up extra good, but it was no help. That night in my sleep for hours it seemed I had become a fluke, undulating along across the floors of ancient seas, my mouth open, trying to catch something to eat. The next day I gave the five cleaned fish to my sister. I never fished again.
YOUNG ARTIST AT WORK
When I was a wee boy I liked to draw cartoon characters. I did a very good Mickey Mouse. And then I kept drawing. A friend of my father’s thought that I might be talented and wanted to encourage me. He made me a drawing board to work on and gave me different kinds of paper and pens. By the time I was about 9 I was specializing in drawing fish, of course. Over the years my mother would go into my room from time to time to see what kinds of fish were on my drawing board. I won a prize in my art class in elementary school for a carving of a swordfish out of a big bar of soap, soap hard enough for me to make a fish image with an almost-sharp sword.
And then it happened that during my first year in high school one day my mother looked on my drawing board and was, in her words, “shocked” to see two drawings of naked babes, showing tits and ass. My mother was rather closed to sex most of her life, but after that day I overheard her talking to her girlfriends, several times, happily telling the story of the great change on my drawing board, and that was the most risqué Mom ever got.
[photo]
Sister Pat and me in Atlantic Beach just before I entered high school at age 13.
EDUCATION CAN BE FUN
High school was like liberation. You were on your own. You could talk to friends in the halls, and the classes were lively. The teachers were way younger than in elementary school. I took to wearing big loud neckties just for fun and I fell all-out in love with my math teacher. She was about 25 and was really beautiful. Miss Hoffman. My elementary school teachers had been mostly mean and old and Miss Hoffman was soo nice. In the second week, when she was teaching something, I raised my hand high.
She said, “Yes, Mr. Newman?” I stood up and declared, “I love you!” Everyone laughed. In my need to have fun I forgot that I was still living in an atomic bomb target and felt good about life.
When it came time for the Christmas holiday break I decided that the class should get Miss Hoffman a comic Christmas gift. In a dry goods store I found a very large pair of pink rubber old lady’s underpants. On them in blue ball point ink I drew a kind of back door to the undies, buttoned down with 2 blue ink buttons. Inside the back door I wrote, Merry Christmas Miss Hoffman”, and everyone in the class signed their names. Miss Hoffman laughed hard at the unique gift.
She was friends with my English teacher, Mr. Neumann, who I didn’t like. She played tennis with him. Once in class he read aloud some lines from a poem:
Dark as the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I am the captain of my fate.
I am the conqueror of my soul.
He asked us what it meant. I raised my hand and said, “It means bad as it gets from birth to death he still says he’s in charge.” “Wrong”, said Mr. Neumann. “Anyone else?” No one spoke. Then he said, “It means hard as it gets from birth to death, I’m still in command.”
After about 2 seconds the whole class burst out laughing. “What’s the matter?” asked Mr. N. “That’s what Robert said,” someone answered, “And you told him he was wrong!” Everyone howled except him. He was mad. After class he made some stupid remark to me and I decided to hit him, but my buddy Angie, who was a weight lifter, pushed me out of the room before it got hot.
DRAMA WITH MY SCIENCE TEACHER
Also in my freshman year I had an old chaotic chemistry teacher, Mr. Levy. I soon noticed that he could be led off track. In the 3rd class I wrote a note and everyone passed it around the room. It read, “When I stand up and say, ‘Footprints on the ceiling’, everyone stand up and look and point to the ceiling.” When the last person in the class had read my note I raised my hand high. Mr. Levy had just been talking about sulfur.
“Yes, Mr. Newman?” he asked. I stood up and declared, “Sulfur, there’s a lot of it in the western United States, where there used to be Indians, but they’ve been displaced. Many of them have come east. Look, footprints on the ceiling!” 7 or 8 of my classmates stood and pointed to the ceiling with me as we all smiled. Mr. Levy, who was a nervous old man, said it was very amusing, asked us to sit down, and continued to talk sulfur.
The chem class was in a room with a marble-topped teaching table over which Mr. Levy made experiments and taught us. One day he was heating hydrochloric acid in a test tube over a Bunsen burner flame, to release hydrogen, and the whole class got nervous.
We knew that the hydrogen was flammable and he had the test tube too near the flame as he talked. Then some one who was in the girl’s room came in through the door causing a draft from an open window which blew the flame into the hydrogen, and, WHAM, a nasty little explosion sent acid and glass everywhere, though amazingly no one got hurt bad. Everyone left the room disgusted with Mr. Levy to get into the bathrooms to wash off. Somehow he was okay but got some on his glasses. He was apologizing repeatedly. But we were to have our revenge.
The last day of class, just before the New York State regent’s exam for chemistry, we arrived to find that instead of a last day celebration Mr. Levy was giving us an unannounced 20 minute test. We had to take out paper and write out answers to questions handed out to us. I was really irritated.
After about 20 minutes he told us to stop writing, and he went on to prepare us for the regent’s exam. It became clear that he didn’t want our test papers. It was a study exam. I had a bright idea.
I started gathering the test papers from people around me and tearing them up fast into little pieces. The guy next to me joined in. We were building up two piles of paper pieces quickly as Mr. Levy went on, oblivious to what we might be doing. We got all the test pages shredded just before the bell rang ending the class.
A girl near the door who was working with us opened the classroom door just as another girl opened the window, to let loose the famous draft that caused the explosion, and we tossed the piles of paper pieces up into the classroom air where they hung suspended, filling the air and swirling up with the draft. It was a thing of beauty. I left the room hearing Mr. Levy’s voice loud and clear, “Wait till I get that Newman”. P.S. He didn’t get me, and I got one of four 100s in the New York State regent exam in chemistry.
Lucky me. I was going to be a doctor.
AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Some time in my freshman year of high school I went to Washington D.C. with my mother, father, and sister. My father had a little office equipment business in Manhattan, and had somehow managed to sell some office equipment to the White House. He got friendly with the White House office manager, who invited dad to visit some time.
Soon dad had made an appointment to visit, and we drove to Washington with my mother and sister. After we checked into a hotel, Dad took me with him and drove to the White House. Somehow at that time it wasn’t that hard to drive into the White House compound and park in a lot marked visitors, near the office entrance, at the back of the building. Dad spoke into an intercom and we were buzzed in. The office manager, Mr. Hansen, greeted us and walked us though the office, into a hallway. He was really nice and wanted to show us just a bit of the White House proper.
Down the hallway he opened a door and we looked in. There was a big wood table, shiny and dark, with 10 leather chairs around it, each with a bronze emblem, saying: President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, etc. Without hesitation I pressed though my father and Mr. Hansen and walked into the room, going directly to the President’s chair at the head of the table. I sat down, eased back, and looked around. Since my father and Mr. Hansen were amused, I had a moment. I wondered something like, “If this is the most powerful chair in the world, what are all the forces at play here?” They waited for me to rise and exit on my own. I only took a few seconds but I did take my time. When I started to get up out of the President’s chair I noticed an ashtray on the great table in front of me. In it were several books of matches with the words “Swiped from Harry Truman.” I smiled and took one. He got me.
On our way out of Washington I noticed we were passing a large stately stone building with the words Atomic Energy Commission boldly on it. I insisted that my father stop the car, and I ran up the long flight of white marble steps to the entrance to the building. Two fully armed marines stopped me and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted brochures and any information I could get on the atomic bomb for a science project in high school. They turned me away.
RUNNING FOR OFFICE
As high school progressed I remained wild but stayed out of trouble, until my senior year when I ran for Vice President, the second highest elected office. There were three parties, each with four candidates: President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. My party was the X party. The big event we were heading toward was a series of four presentations on the stage of the auditorium, one each for the senior, junior, sophomore, and freshman assemblies, giving them our ideas about running the school. I had to write a speech and deliver it.
The night before the election assemblies I was stuck. I had given the job of writing my speech to a smart friend, George, but I was unsatisfied with his clever remarks. Then I decided, what the hell, I’ll be wild.
Before the first assembly we had to show our speeches to the faculty election advisor. I showed him the clever speech George wrote for me. No problem. The first assembly was the seniors, my class. One of the two guys I was running against, Biff, was on the football team, which was mostly seniors. For some reason I really wanted to get them.
When it came my turn to make my speech I said into the microphone, “If I am elected Vice President I promise you a real burlesque show, right on this stage. Ah yes, I can see it all now. The barker is calling, “Here on my left ladies and gentlemen are 8 lovely exciting Egyptian belly dancers. They walk, they talk, and they crawl on their bellies like reptiles, shaking each muscle individually and collectively.’ I never got another word out. Pandemonium broke loose. Laughter rocked the audience. The quarterback of the football team almost fell out of the balcony howling.
The faculty advisor was avidly trying to get my attention. I smiled and said into the microphone, “We don’t have time to discuss it all now, so just stop me anytime to talk.” Then I introduced the Secretary candidate from my party, Margie Tucker.
I got yelled at hard for being wild. I was threatened with expulsion if I used the microphone for outrageous behavior again. I didn’t, but I also had little to say in the next three assemblies and lost the election by a slim margin to Biff the footballer. It was all worth it because I got the quarterback in the senior assembly. The main thing was that I was searching for ways to come alive in the atomic age.
Three things shook me in my senior year. A friend of the family, a 31 year old father of two, died of pneumonia. So young. I was shocked. That was depressing. Then my friend Jason’s older brother had a heart attack at the age of 29, which did serious damage. That disturbed me. But what really tore the ground out from under me was when my beautiful cousin, 23 years old, with two children, got leukemia, and went down months after being diagnosed. We were mortal and it felt depressingly hard.
POETS IN DANGEROUS TIMES
My friend Peter and I were close from when we were 5 years old on through high school and far beyond. Very close. He eventually became a major songwriter for the Grateful Dead, using the name Peter Monk. For years he flew on jet planes with the Dead when they gave concerts. Because he gave himself the last name Monk some, through their drug haze, saw him as “spiritual advisor for the Dead”.
Unlike my parents, who had American high school education only, Peter’s parents had been born and college-educated in Vienna. They taught Peter and his brother Bobby and me about literature and music. Before we went to high school we had been introduced to major poets and musicians of the past. Peter and I were both anxious about the present world. We both saw the potential for unprecedented darkness. Both of us wanted to be great poets and have an impact on the world, as directly as possible.
Also in high school with us was John Giorno, who was to become a renowned poet and a very close friend of mine in the years to come, after
college. John and I would both be in the forefront of avant-garde poetry, and we both would become direct students of Dudjom Rinpoche, a grand master of Tibetan Buddhism.
After high school Peter went to the University of Michigan, where he was admired and had his way with the English department. I entered a premed program at a small college in upstate New York, Hobart College.
In my English class the first day the teacher asked us to write about any event in our lives, at least a page or two, as a homework assignment. I couldn’t wait to get back to my dorm room to write about what happened to me as a twelve year old when I went to sleep and woke up instead.
I worked and worked for hours trying to express it. Finally I had a paragraph of about 6 sentences called Knowledge of Death. The teacher looked at it in front of the class and was confused. He looked for another page. “Is this all of it?” he asked me. “That’s it,” I said. He said maybe I should try again. It would take me many more years to know what had happened to me as a boy. It was to take almost 20 years of work with Tibetan meditation masters to understand.
After a year and a half as an honors student in the premed program at Hobart College, I hit the wall. I had to leave Hobart. I returned to the family house in Brooklyn. For lack of guidance, yet wanting to continue with college, I entered a chemical engineering program at a respected engineering school, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and I was lost.
Sleeping in the same bed I was in as a twelve year old when I had some experience of the absolute world, I suffered through my engineering studies and began to write poetry. “The live fish lay gasping on the wharf, not knowing.”
Peter would come home from Michigan for vacation, and we got closer. We were both writing and he had just published his first poems in the University of Michigan literary magazine. At that time the general darkness of life, the continued threat of nuclear or biological weapon disasters, was hard for us both. We both thought that an advance of the use of language could help evolution.
THE START OF THE LONG WAY INTO SEX
I was about 7 and I was playing with my friend Jane in her back-yard. She was about the same age as me. She asked me, “Do you want to see my thing?” “Sure,” I said. She stepped closer to me, lifted her dress, and pulled down her panties. I looked carefully at the crack between her legs and said to her, “You can’t really see much.” She tried to open the hole a little. There was pink flesh inside, but you still couldn’t see much.
“Let me see the other hole,” I said. Jane turned around, with her dress hiked and her panties down, and bent over. Her asshole was dark and you couldn’t see anything at all.
Just then Jane’s mother caught us and threw open the kitchen window with a shout. I ran away and returned to my house. I had just learned something important. If you made friends with a girl you could get to see her stuff.
It wasn’t until 12 years later that I finally poked into the pink female thing. It was a black hooker in Harlem and I did ask her to open it wide as possible first so I could have a good look. She did and I decided to leave. She shouted. I dropped my pants, and with no joy I proceeded to initiate myself in the front hole of a black woman.
My sexual life after that got easier, but that’s all I’m going to say. I won’t kiss and tell about any of my necessary sexual relations. But when I close my eyes and see into the dark I can feel them all. It’s helped me feel naked all my life.
SLOW HAND AND MOM & MARIE
As I grew up I tried to figure out who my parents were. My father’s father,
Adolph, seemed very German to me, and growing up in WWII that bothered me, but so did my father’s moustache, which he wore characteristically all his life, exactly like Hitler’s moustache. My father wore it innocently. His father did not sport a moustache. Adolph dressed fastidiously clean, held himself up tall and tight-lipped. In control. Cold to his kin as I recall. Fortunately his wife, Hannah, was lively and had a big laugh, and it’s good that my father was more like Hannah.
I’d say that Jack Newman was a normal guy sexually. He was a good dancer and was something of a live wire. But that was Brooklyn in the early 1900s. It wasn’t time for the sexual revolution and Jack had to be happy with what he got. I guess he got a few. In his late 20’s he became good friends with my mother’s handsome brothers, and there it was that he met Estelle.
My mother loved her brothers and Jack came to her from the inside. It happened that one night Jack came over to see the guys but they were out. Jack asked Stell to go to the movies with him. My fate was sealed. And so it was that the demure virgin Stell wed, and I became inevitable. But as Stell’s mother told her, sex was not for pleasure. Women allowed it to satisfy their husbands and to have children. My mother accepted that and made it her oath.
My father good-naturedly kept Trojan condoms near the bed, but he had a lot of obstacles, not the least of which were my mother’s extremely heavy periods and her bad back. But he loved her, even if he wasn’t really loved,
and through the years they had enough time for my mother to open up sexually. From what she told my sister later on, it sounds like she never did. BUT, Stell did have one very special friend, who she dated through the years, and that was Marie. They were friends from high school where they both played on the James Madison High School women’s basketball team. And they stayed close after that all their lives. Mom would tell Pat that Marie was her best friend.
By the time I was playing basketball and attending James Madison, Mom and Marie would occasionally date. Marie was an unusual woman usually with short hair. She was good looking like Estelle and it was hot to see how they dressed up for each-other. My father accepted that Stell had an old close relationship with Marie. I believe that the ladies went away for a weekend a couple of times over the years, once to Brokeback Mountain – only kidding. I believe that Mom and Marie were not lovers but I believe Mom was closer to Marie than she was with Jack and Pat and me
Late in life Pat asked Dad to record his famous recital of The Kid’s Last Fight, a story told in rhyme about two boxers who were close friends:
“Us two was pals, the Kid and me.
He tipped the scales at t’irty t’ree….”
Dad made two copies, for Pat and for me, for posterity. Remarkably he signed the recordings, “Slow Hand”. We didn’t put that on your gravestone, Dad. Nor did we say anything about Marie at Mom’s funeral when she was 94.
GO WEST YOUNG MAN
After high school, after a year and a half of pre-med studies at Hobart College, and after a year and a half trapped at Brooklyn Poly, I broke out. I was ready to leave college and go live with my uncle Henry in Paris, where I’d write – a real possibility, supported by Henry, but an older student in two of my classes, Barry, encouraged me to think about finishing college in California. He particularly asked me to think about going to the University of California at Berkeley, a great university, across the Bay from San Francisco, a city of culture. I did apply to Cal Berkeley, with transcripts showing me go from Dean’s list to probation; I was doubtful that I’d be accepted. Then just when I was ready to get my ticket to go to Paris I was accepted to Cal Berkeley, land of Nobel Prize nuclear science and quantum physics, with as many distinguished departments as Harvard. I had a fresh start on my education as a guy who still felt the world had no future.
I worked for the California Highway System in Santa Rosa over the summer. At night and on weekends I kept to myself and read many of the great novels, including War and Peace; Anna Karina; Magic Mountain; Ulysses; The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment; and American poetry, mostly Whitman and T.S. Eliot. I also put a pillow over my face to try to induce paranormal experience and I succeeded.
Then I went down to Berkeley and got an apartment with two roommates. For some reason I decided to walk into the locker room of the University of California football team, the California Bears. The only person I found in the big locker room was Pappy Waldorf, the famous coach of the team. He had won several Rose Bowls. I knew who he was. I went right up to him and said I was interested in playing. He was huge, must have been six foot four and well over 300 pounds. I was six feet tall and weighed maybe 180.
I told him I played wide receiver on the Hobart College freshman football team. I was amazed to learn that he knew the Hobart coach and respected the Hobart teams, which really were impressive. Coach Waldorf slapped me on the butt, got me fit out with a uniform, and directed me out onto the playing field where the Bears were aggressively scrimmaging. What the hell was I doing?
I only lasted two scrimmages. On the first one I was lucky and did ok. On my second try I took a violent block across the ankles from a small black all-American halfback. I hit the earth hard face down, paused, got up and went back behind the scrimmage to take a breather, and then I inconspicuously went back into the locker room and quit, unnoticed.
But because I told my roommates I had walked-on into the football team that day and was accepted onto the team by Papi Waldorf, somehow the image of me as a tough and ballsy guy got projected, and served me in my social life. It was 1957. I didn’t know where my life was going, there among the Nobel laureates and vast atomic science facilities that gave me the existential creeps.
PRESIDENTIAL PANDEMONIUM
I had a quiet, intense friend who had been number one in the class of incoming physics students, Russell, a transfer student like me. He came from a tragic family in Sacramento. His father had been a jazz musician who committed suicide; one of his brothers had been institutionalized for years after trying to kill his mother with a big knife, and his other brother, with a wife and three children, was suicidal. Russell was amazed at my audaciousness, yet he pleaded with me to join a fraternity that he had to join because of some family obligation. I grudgingly said okay and for two months I was to enjoy some of the most hilarious escapades of my life, as part of my education.
A big fraternity house just off the UC campus became my temporary home. I was in with a varied group of pledges, mostly freshman. Since I was a football player from New York I was given certain extra attention by the fraternity brothers. Soon they would see that I was a born gang leader.
It was the time of a big national election. Adlai Stevenson was running for President. I forget the republican. The frat brothers were highly republican.
Me and one other pledge, Willy, were secretly liberal democrats. Adlai Stevenson came to Oakland for a political rally. Willy and I quietly attended.
Behind Adlai on the stage was a huge blow-up photo of him, maybe 10 feet high and 8 feet wide. After the rally was over Willy and I hung out near the stage. We blended in with people helping clean up. The giant photo was taken down and rolled up. Willy and I helped with that. And then we told the other guy that we’d take care of the big photo. It was my idea but I couldn’t have done it without Willy.
We quietly walked the magical heist away and into Willy’s car. We waited until it was midnight to sneak the great democrat image into the sanctuary of young republicans. I found a good place to hide it up in the library, on the third floor. We went to sleep early that Saturday morning. About 8 o’clock I got some coffee and headed up to the library, which was empty. I quietly locked the door and barricaded it.
Then I opened the big library window, overseeing the front yard and nearby republican frat houses. I hung the huge Adlai Stevenson photo down the side of the building, where it fit perfectly, well out of reach of the shouting brothers below on the lawn. It clearly looked like my fraternity had dramatically decided to go democrat! I was able to hold my position for a good 20 minutes, having locked and blocked the door well. The bedlam at the door as the frat brothers tried to break though coupled with the craze of the disturbed bros on the lawn beneath the great photo was a thing of beauty.
Finally they broke through the door and pushed through my barricade with an all-out assault. The first person through to get me was Artie, my pledge brother, strongest guy in the fraternity, and he was chuckling. I was howling. The brothers yelled at me and said that I’d be given 92 smacks with the ass-beating paddle that they punished pledges with. I went to my room and put on all my 10 pair of underpants to receive my punishment with a smile.
SMELLY REVENGE
My smile by then was getting to the frat brothers. The next thing I was to do to the frat bros was forceful, but was done as teamwork with five of my pledge brothers in which I was the gang leader.
Shortly after the political embarrassment, the brothers ordered all 17 pledges into the library while they intentionally protracted a serious meeting downstairs. It was obvious punishment.
After 20 minutes or so I said I’m not going to take this shit, I’m going, and I quietly went out the library window down the side of the building to the ground, followed by Willy, Russell, Artie, and Larry. We drove to Oakland Chinatown because I said we needed some old smelly fish.
We found an open Chinese fish market. I went right up to the big owner in his fishy white apron and asked for small smelly fish. He got pissed off and defensive. “My fish no smell! My fish flesh!”
I looked around and saw a bin of little smelt fish. This is what we need, I said with joy. The fish man grumbled in Chinese and sold us three pounds of smelts, 31 fish, wrapped in Chinese newspaper, which I hoped would imprint some incomprehensible message on the fish for the brothers.
Artie crushed the smelts up with his powerful hands to help the fish smell strong and to mash in the Chinese words. [This is absolutely true.]
We sped back to the frat house and climbed back up into the library armed with the smelts. The brothers were still in their long somber meeting, and the library door was unlocked. “Quick,” I said. “Here; everyone grab a few fish and, fast as possible, throw a fish in the back of every frat brother’s clothing closet. Hide them quickly and get back here. Go.”
I sat in mirth as six of the pledges sped quietly out into the big house and then were back in the library in a few minutes. Every clothes closet had been hit except our pledge porch. We congratulated our guys and made them scrub their hands, as the brothers continued to meet, trying to punish us for being a bad pledge group. – Afterwards, interestingly, they never mentioned the fish to us - how’s that for amazing pride - but they had become angry, with the fish smell lingering in their clothes.
The next day we 17 pledge brothers were supposed to sneak away together on the traditional pledge sneak. The brothers weren’t supposed to know where we were going (Russell’s family cottage about 30 miles away.) There were rules by which to judge if the pledge sneak was successful, like if the brothers kidnapped and hid one of the pledges in the sneak process we lost points. I called a pledge meeting at a Berkeley bar to plan our escape.
Not only did we want to escape cleanly to our retreat, we needed to hit the frat house hard on the way out of town. Russell, Artie, and I drove to a chicken factory not too far away. Wow what a smell. Worse than fish stink.
We bought two large burlap sacks of unclean chicken feathers, a huge amount which could go a long way even in a big house, more than 50 pounds of vile feathers. We locked the stink sacks in the trunk of the car, went back to the house, and went to sleep. The next morning would be the pledge sneak escape.
We got up to find that one of our pledge guys was missing and all the frat brothers seemed gone. We enjoyed casting the smelly feathers everywhere in the house, especially in the closets, in a riot of action.
Then as we quickly packed for the getaway I heard a noise in a room just above the pledge sleeping porch. We heard the voice of the missing pledge asking to be released.
I went right out our widow and climbed over the pledge porch and opened the window of the room where little George was being held captive by two frat bros. I jumped at the two of them and got them both by the head, one under each arm, and gave them to Artie, who came through the window close behind me. We tied them up, freed little George, and left for the country.
There were some near-death and some aggravating episodes throughout and after the pledge sneak, so Russell and I moved out of the frat house into a huge room in a big old house diagonally across the street. Russell had a 357 magnum pistol and a BB rifle. The pistol was to cause some drama for us in the years to come. He used the BB gun a lot. He used to set me off howling when he’d shoot at the frat brothers across the street and cause upset. He kept it up for weeks and didn’t get caught.
Russ said I inspired his wildness. I’d say my wildness came from trying to break free.
THE NEAR DEATH OF THE FATHER OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
At that time Russ had a job on a late night shift at the huge atomic power research center up the hillside in Berkeley, the domain of Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”.
Early one morning, about 3:10am, Russell entered a long narrow passageway somewhere in the engineering design between the massive cyclotron and the Bevatron particle accelerator buildings. As he started down the passageway he saw another person coming toward him, Robert Openheimer. They would have to pass very closely.
Russell’s paranoia broke loose. He thought he might have to kill Oppenheimer, who had picked up Russell’s vibes almost immediately but managed to not lose his mind as he approached the coming crisscross in the passageway.
By the time they actually passed each other Oppenheimer was nearly dead of heart failure, but he held on and escaped. Russell was understandably crazed by the incident. But he got by. Later Russell was to become an architect and then a first rate film maker. He worked for CBS News in Europe for a decade, and came back to America completely disturbed.
WHY PAT DIDN’T WANT TO BE MISS BROOKLYN
Mom was good looking and my sister was very pretty. My father was funny-looking, like a comic, and he was proud of his good-looking family. Without asking Pat’s permission, when she was 17, he sent a photo of her into the Miss Brooklyn contest for the Miss America competition. Pat was selected as one of the four finalists. She was a shy girl and was angry at Dad and Mom for getting her involved without asking her. But her good friend Marilyn was also one of the final four, so Pat did it. They drove around Brooklyn in September in an open Cadillac convertible, each of the girls wearing a one piece bathing suit. They waved to the many people they made smile along the way, but Pat didn’t enjoy it. She felt humiliated.
Pat still hasn’t forgiven Dad for that. Even though in the final-four photo clearly Pat and Marilyn were the outstanding beauties of the group, one of the other girls was selected. Pat doesn’t like that photo. It was not right that she wasn’t asked if she wanted to be Miss Brooklyn. It’s remarkable how long painful emotions can last.
But I’ll tell you a story Pat does like. I was 18 and she was 14 and my parents let me take her out on a double date with my friend Mike. He had a nice car. Mike decided that it would be fun if we went to see a burlesque show, and we all agreed. That was 1953 and comic burlesque with tit and ass was fun and probably still is. It was hard to believe how big some of the dancers’ breasts were. I liked the comic skits. It was dark enough in the audience and Pat was tall enough so that the waitress didn’t card her. She asked Pat what she wanted to drink. Pat had never even had a beer. She glanced around quickly and saw a sign for Four Roses. “I’ll have a Four Roses,” said Pat. “How do you want that?” asked the waitress. “In a glass!” said Pat, and we all did laugh. But Pat recalls that when we got home and she smelled a little of alcohol I got seriously yelled at. I tried to not show my smile.
THE POET TRAPPED IN THE MILITARY COMMAND
When I graduated Cal Berkeley in 1958, still wanting to be a doctor, I lived with the underlying disturbances of the thermonuclear age. I was aware of the resources given to military science and the nuclear industry. Peter had graduated from the University of Michigan and was an officer in the US Navy. Most of my other friends were being drafted and were getting 2 year
tours of duty in the infantry in Germany. Like Peter I had officer training in college. I decided to cut a deal with the army. I’d be placed on a guided missile base just north of New York City and I could go home for three weekends a month, plus I would play on both the baseball and basketball teams. The downside was that it was 3 years of military service instead of 2, but I took the deal. My first day in the Army was memorable.
In Manhattan I joined a group of 11 guys going to Fort Dix, New Jersey. A sergeant asked, strongly, “Does anyone here have ROTC training?” I did, two years in college. I was put in charge of the men. That pattern would persist in my brief military career, and it served me well the first day.
In Fort Dix we were shouted at and quickly given large amounts of gear to stuff into a big duffle bag. Then our hair was cut off and we were injected with various substances and ordered back to the barracks.
Left to myself for a moment I felt free. In my duffle bag was a nice officer-looking uniform, with the same hat the officers wore. While the other guys were just trying to calm down I dressed up nicely in the officer-like uniform and went out into big bad Fort Dix.
As soon as I got outside the building three officers came by and saluted me. I had an over-casual response but got away with it. I found that a movie was playing and I watched it, Anastasia, with Yul Brenner and Ingrid Bergman. It was excellent. When I got back to the barracks the guys said to me, “Where were you?” I said, “I tried on some clothes and went to a movie.” They said that two sergeants had come in just after I left and hazed them bad. They were made to crawl around the building searching for cigarette buts and were generally abused, so that they would respect being commanded, I guess.
The next day we were stuffed into a bus with our duffle bags. I was the last one on-board, just able to push myself inside the door so it could close. When we reached the site of the 4 barrack complex that would be our training unit home base, the bus driver opened the door and I stepped down.
The driver said he didn’t know where our reception committee was. He told me to go knock on the barracks door across the way. I did. There was some sound. I opened the door. Four army guys were smoking drinking whisky and playing cards. “What!!?” someone shouted at me. I said, “The driver said to tell you the recruits are here.” They leaped up energetically, grabbed their helmets shouting, and as I stepped back they burst through the door, passing me with simulated anger to get the new recruits out of the bus.
They attacked the bus doors and began to grab and throw the new guys out of the bus, one by one, shouting loudly at them, throwing their steel helmets hard into the feet of the new guys to make them line up. I quietly stepped into the back of the line.
We were marched into a hall and commanded to stand at attention. We were talked at with contempt. There was a silence. Then one of the sergeants called out toughly, “Newman!” I answered, “Yes?” He called back to me, “Yes what?!” I said, “Yes sergeant.” “Okay,” he said. “You will be the noncommissioned officer in charge of your unit.” I was lucky there was no war going on, just the underlying stress of living in dangerous times.
I was given my own room in the barrack that I was in charge of. I had an assortment of young men ranging from two antagonistic giants, Polish Ben, and Italian Mario, and a gentle violinist from the St. Louis symphony orchestra, Steven.
I was good at moving the men in file by counting cadence, like, “Hit ‘em again with your left, your right. Hit ‘em again with your left, your right. Cadence count, one, two, three, four. One two. Three four. Had a girl on a hill. Cadence count I got a thrill. One, two, three, four. One two. Three four.” I was good at it and the men liked it, and I liked not having to walk in step with them, moving along at the side of the group, enjoying Fort Dix.
The second week I had to try to break up a huge fight between big Ben and bad Mario. So I tried out my tough commander face and shouted them to a stop long enough to get it diffused. I got to be their friend, a man among men, but I also liked having Steven play passionate versions of Bach sonatas in my room at rest time. I put up a poem on the barrack bulletin board about hand grenades and soul food. I don’t know how it happened, but when my group crawled through the obstacle course under machine gun fire I was back in the orderly room typing a new poem. The truth was I could have led my men in battle if I had to. But living in the nuclear age I didn’t want to.
The culmination of basic training was the seventh week, when I got to take my guys out into simulated battle conditions, with bullets and grenades. Tracer bullets lit the air and sergeants screamed at us in the dark. I asked one if he was crazy and he went wild. We kept going.
In one field we were taught fire power. A black sergeant commanded us. He said you fire and you fire and you fire your weapon and you keep the enemy down. I asked him loud and clear if he meant Russians and Chinese, because if he did there were more of them than us and they have more firepower. He got furious. He said, “We can kill ten to one of those faggots. You want to try to attack me?” “Why would I try to do that,” I said. “I’d just shoot you from here.” I thought he’d have a seizure, but we got through the night. I was on the edge, as ever, looking for a way out.
NUCLEAR MISSILES AND THE TURNING POINT
After basic training I was sent to a guided missile base in Connecticut, my assignment for my tour of duty, not far from New York City. After 4 days there with the guided missiles I realized I couldn’t do it. I went to the chief medical officer and looked him right in the eyes. “Basic training was crazy enough,” I said. I described my 7th week encounters. I said I was healthy and clear-headed and I simply could not serve in a unit capable of incinerating millions of people.
He sent me to St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York, for psychological observation. My sister Pat drove me to the hospital. When I arrived they placed me in a locked ward where orderlies registered me, took my clothes and my bag, and gave me a patient’s gown to put on. They led me to a steel cell with a heavy door.
They gently led me into the room and then locked me in with a wham. I was suddenly deeply shocked and I panicked all out for the first time in my life. I pounded and pounded on the steel door and shouted for attention. No one responded. I quieted down. Another step to finding my way in the atomic night.
The next day I was put in an open ward and I consulted with a medical officer. He asked me about my state of mind. I told him there was nothing wrong with my mind. It’s just that there was no war on and it wasn’t good for me to participate in the nuclear military. I said it would make me sick. I saw the same psychiatrist once a week and told that story. What I came to see was that if I said nothing else I’d be processed for an honorable discharge “for convenience of service to the government”.
It worked. It took two months of processing, with weekends off with my girlfriend Jane, who lived a couple of miles from the hospital. Internally what happened was that I developed an overwhelming state of depression, almost crippling, but I had to contain it. I didn’t ask for drugs. I was afraid if I told the medic about the long periods of intense depression he might keep me in the hospital longer. The stress was extreme. My parents didn’t understand it. Jane did. She helped me get through. The depression had a powerful impact on me for many months to come, slow time in a hard world. I was discharged after three months.
My parents were confused by me. I was 22 and free of any military obligation. The world felt very dangerous, very stressful. I was depressed. I needed more time to figure out what to do. So I went to Europe for a year, on a German passenger ship, to see European art and architecture and to spend time in Paris with my uncle Henry. He knew I was serious about writing and he encouraged me.
HEALING IN EUROPE
So there I was, October, 1959, on a German ship heading across the Atlantic eastward toward Europe and the sources of Western civilization, feeling that art might heal me. I had strong feelings about the potential of art in this dark age.
I had a perfect guide to the art of Europe, Leonard, a painter who had studied the art and architecture of Europe at Cooper Union Art School in New York for 4 years, and he was totally psyched. He knew where all the best art was. He was going to see it at last.
We arrived in Paris. I stayed with Henry and my aunt Emmy, and the next day Leonard and I went to the magnificent Louvre Museum. Walking slowly through truly great galleries of famous paintings we came upon a room of Rembrandts.
I stood before Bathsheba, wife of David, mother of Solomon, kings of Israel, a painting of a life-sized naked woman, luminously white, who has just read a letter from David. Facing front completely, right at you, wide open, sitting on her bed, she was stunningly displayed in human flesh alive with light.
In a flash I experienced the importance of visual art in the world, especially in the atomic era.
A few days later we went to Chartres cathedral. The magnificent spiritual architecture gave me a multidimensional sense of the potential of spiritual architecture in our age. My journey to Europe was quickly giving me healing opportunities.
We were riding on a train out of France and into western Germany when Leonard cried out to me to grab my bag and get off the train with him fast. We had stopped at a station. He had just noticed that the train stop was Issenheim, home of the famous Gruenwald triptych, The Resurrection of Christ.
[photo]
We found the painting in a back room of a humble church. It was spectacular, a remarkable achievement of figure painting, a human form in brilliant rainbow light, a powerful body of light, arising. That opened me to the potential of spiritual art.
I got tired of traveling and decided to go to Vienna and hear opera for a while. I had never been to an opera before, but I loved Mozart. I stayed for three weeks and attended many operas. I also got a lot of loving healing from an American girl spending the winter there. Then I went back to Paris to quiet down for a few months and write. Uncle Henry was a good guide to Paris and Europe in general.
He had graduated first in his class at St. John’s Law School in New York and went to Europe as an officer in naval intelligence. He worked out of Paris as soon as it was liberated. He was in a special unit that was seeking German work on the atomic bomb. It was considered so top priority that Henry was sometimes sent into hot areas just cleared, to see if he could apprehend any German intelligence, among ruined buildings, carnage, fires, and receding explosions.
After Germany surrendered he worked in the Nuremberg war trails. Then he stayed on in Europe. He was courted by the CIA but avoided it. He was at home in Germany after the war. He met Emmy there, an American girl who had grown up and was educated well on a farm in Connecticut. Her father was a successful artist. Henry married Emmy and had a law practice in Heidelberg for years, read Hemmingway and T. S. Eliot, and then settled comfortably in Paris with Emmy. Henry was my ideal intelligence agent for the good life in postwar Europe. I decided to stay on in Paris until I healed from depression completely.
MY EXCITING DISCOVERY OF AMERICAN ART IN PARIS
Henry got me a nice room in a small hotel in the shadows of Napoleon’s tomb. I started to do breathing, just breathing, finding stillpoint in slow time, with the support of the monumental emptiness of the tomb. Reading and writing and breathing.
Into Paris came my buddy Peter, in his naval officer uniform. Henry loved and admired him at first sight, like he was a magical image of himself in that same uniform when he was young.
Peter found home with us for the weekend. We drank too much and Peter got wild and angry, took a swing at Henry, angry that the military was running the world with him stuck helping them. Peter left in a sad rage to return to the aircraft carrier Randolph in the Mediterranean Sea. [Later, in 1960, I was able to help him get out of the navy much as I got out of the army, talking to medics.]
In the spring before I left Paris on my way back to America, there was a stunningly impressive exhibition of abstract expressionist American art at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. It consisted of 18 of Jackson Pollack’s paintings, including the biggest and best of the open field works, and two each of the best paintings of De Kooning, Kline, Gorky, Motherwell, Still, Rothko, and a few others. The impact was unforgettable. When European artists went to America after the Germans occupied Paris they found the work of artists in that show and they declared that the genius of western art had shifted to America. What a great thing for a young poet to see before returning to New York to try to establish himself. My life force was healing with art. I returned to New York quietly on the Queen Elizabeth transatlantic liner, wondering what I would do.
TIM LEARY AND THE PINK POWER PILLS
Back in New York in 1959 I soon met Ann Rower, a gem of an English lit major at the University of Michigan involved with the UM literary magazine. Ann knew my life-long buddy Peter. Peter, Ann, and I got very close on Peter’s leaves from the aircraft carrier Randolph. Once it docked in New York harbor and Peter took us aboard. Afterwards he got angry and reenlisted in the Navy, but the three of us had much karma together to come.
An event of magical luminosity happened to Ann and I out on a Long Island beach at night in the summer. We parked the car on the edge of the sand and walked down to the black ocean. We took off our clothes and went in. We dove under, came up near each other, and we were amazed. We were luminescent! We were covered with billions of tiny luminous jellyfish. We swirled our luminous bodies and marveled. Then we started to hug and merge.
Suddenly a police car arrived, gliding past our car, slowly coming all the way onto the beach. We started to make our escape. We could see the limit of their flashlights. We skirted their lights, got out of the water, grabbed our clothes, got into our car, and sped off naked, still gleaming with the excellent body light.
In September 1960 Ann and I were married and moved to Boston. Ann had a fellowship to Harvard. I quickly lucked into a job one night a week as the attendant at the desk of the poetry room at the Harvard library, and I got free-lance editing work at a good publishing house, Beacon Press.
I called my friend Ben, a savvy mentor who lived in Berkeley, California. Ben said he was suffering in Berkeley but he had two friends who had just arrived at Harvard, Tim Leary and Frank Barron, and Tim had a big house in Brighton. Ben said that Tim might invite him to stay in his large house. Ben said that Tim and Frank were transpersonal psychologists from the psychology department at Cal Berkeley and they were experimenting with a powerful new drug at Harvard. Ben gave me Tim’s phone number.
I called and spoke to Tim. He did think highly of Ben. Tim said that if I got Ben an airplane ticket to fly to Boston, he could stay in Tim’s house and maybe help with the drug experimentation. I was glad I was able to help Ben fly into new horizons. Looked like interesting living theater to me.
Within two days Frank Barron drove over to the apartment where Ann and I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston, to visit a little and then to go to the airport to pick up Ben. Frank’s wife Nancy was with him, a tall beauty Frank had met when she was a show girl in Las Vegas who came from a family steeped in academic anthropology. Frank was considered the world’s foremost expert on creativity. He had interviewed T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and other prominent artists to study the creative experience.
In our apartment Frank told me about a remarkable experience he had the night before with the drug they were trying to study. He described going head on into death and through it, remaining aware. I figured it could be an enlightenment experience or a drug high or both. As we discussed Frank’s experience from the night before I was sitting in front of the live fireplace, working the flames. Something paranormal and silent happened between Frank and me and the flames. The trip was on. Frank said I was a shaman.
On the way to the airport I learned that Tim had been shocked profoundly a few months ago when his wife committed suicide, leaving him with their two children, a 13 year old girl and a boy of 11. Both Tim and Frank had one year contracts with the Harvard psychology department. Tim went ahead with life as best as he could.
On the way from Cal Berkeley to Harvard that summer, Tim, his children, Frank, and Nancy vacationed in Mexico, at a rented Villa, for a month, and there Tim and Frank ingested large amounts of the famed psilocybe mexicana mushroom and had breakthrough experiences. Tim began to write a lyrical novel (which he showed me).
HARVARD AND THE MAGIC MUSHROOMS
Then, by a golden stroke of history, they learned that Sandos Pharmaceuticals had just synthesized the agents in the psilocybe mushroom into a pink, sugarcoated pill, bound to have a powerful effect on the mind.
Tim took to the phone and locked a deal with Sandos to be given a large stock of the drug to experiment with at Harvard. Sandos was so happy. Tim and Frank were rocking. They arrived at Harvard in early September and cases of the Sandos power pills arrived quickly thereafter, about 2 weeks before I met them.
We got Ben at the airport and drove to Tim’s big house in a Boston suburb, and there I met Tim. The scene had been designed by central casting with consummate genius. We went into a very large and comfortable living room. Ann and I sat on a couch near Tim and Frank. On a round table in front of us was nothing but a plastic drug container of small pink magic pills. On a couch across from us lay a human being, seemingly holding himself stretched out in tension, his arms at his sides. “Who’s that?” I quietly asked Tim. “That’s the chairman of the Harvard psychology department,” said Tim. “He’s having a bad trip.”
I opened the container and spread out some of its hundred pink pills that felt like a potent psychotropic agent, used by shaman and seers of Mexico to access super-reality. The mushroom is called the Flesh of God, I was told.
I asked Tim how many pills the guy took who was laying there fighting the experience. Tim said that was 2 pills. I asked Frank how many pills he had taken the night before to experience death and awareness. Frank said two. Without hesitating I took 12. Tim and Frank were amazed. Ann took two pills.
I was sitting cross-legged on the couch, and there I stayed for hours, unmoving. Ann sometimes sat beside me, but mostly she hung out with Tim, Frank, and Ben. Across from me the professor laid out flat, tense and unmoving, for hours, and I sat cross-legged on the couch, hour after hour, silent, smiling, in open awareness, and having a very good time.
From time to time Tim or Frank would gently come up to me with clipboards, pens, and paper, seeking reports. I smiled at them knowingly, remaining silent. Finally, after several hours, the young poet spoke. I said something like I’d been experiencing the understanding beyond understanding. Ann also had a good trip on her 2 pills. Tim and Frank and Ben all seemed happy with Ann and me. We had done well on the superdrug.
TAKING THE MAGIC PILLS HOME
At my request, Tim gave me a plastic container of 100 of the pink power pills to take home to experiment with. Score that for poetry. Can’t beat that for a first meeting with Tim. I smoked marijuana sometimes, and knew about other traditional drugs, but these pink pills took drug taking into new domain. Tim and I were to become friends, and that house had many memorable gatherings that storied year.
About 7 days later I had my first scheduled session to be attendant at the desk in the Harvard library poetry room. In our apartment I ate six pink pills, took a batch of blank paper and a few pens, kissed Ann goodbye, and went off to work, though public transit to Cambridge, confident that I could extend the English language, right there in the hall of poetry at Harvard, on my very first night on the job.
The drug hit as I started up the steps into the library. Someone who worked there showed me the desk I had to sit at in the poetry room. It was a beauty, with a stately matching chair. I sat down and assumed command. No one bothered me for the 6 hours of my shift, and I wrote 55 pages of excited poetry, working innuendo and overtone in the lyrical flow, finally feeling free as a poet. My language had been chemically liberated. The drug felt like a tool of human development. That was indeed a memorable night.
To add to the generally charming scene Ann and I had landed in, Frank decided that I was “one of the two or three best poets alive.” Stroked my ego big time. I was somehow relieved of my duties at the Harvard library poetry room after the one great session, but I continued to work on good books for Beacon Press and take six pink pills once a week to plunge into untapped potential of language.
LOOKING IN THE MAGIC MIRROR
I bet most people who have ever tripped have at some time felt the urge to look in the mirror and see who they really are, looking yourself right in the eyes. At some point high in the apartment with Ann I got that urge. As soon as I did I got excited. I was going to look into the bathroom mirror head on and see who I really was. That was it. And I went to the mirror and looked and looked. I watched my face develop as fast as I could see. The change was alive and quick. My face was opening, and opening. And then there it was. The change stopped and a face stayed. It was David, the poet king. King David of the psalms. The face had stopped opening and changing. It stayed. I walked away.
I said to myself, “You’d better never tell this to anyone or they’ll think you’re a crazy egoist.” Drugs sure can stir things up.
SAVING WILLIAM BURROUGHS
Frank showed my poetry to Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, who were among many people attracted to the power drugs at Tim’s house. One night Tim called me and asked for my help. He said that he’d brought William Borroughs to America, to his house, to help promote the use of consciousness-expanding drugs in society, but Tim had some big tasks and needed someone to pal with William in the house while he went to his office at Harvard. William at that time was my favorite new writer. I had read Naked Lunch twice. Being asked to take care of William for a while was as much fun as being given the Harvard poetry room to write in.
William had been a heroin junky and was generally nervous, and double nervous about being back in America after decades of living in Morocco. He experienced America as a police state and was in serious need of drugs to calm down. Unfortunately Tim only had the psychedelic power pills, two of which had almost killed William when he arrived the night before. The fact that William had attended college at Harvard was no help at all.
What William needed was some good marijuana, but Tim didn’t have any. Tim left, and William, Ann, and I were alone. In a back room I found some dried psilocybe mushrooms and shredded some which rolled nicely into fat joints which we smoked for a mild buzz.
William calmed down and since he liked young men, and liked Ann, we mellowed into a peaceful zone, under clouds of smoke in a back room in Tim’s house, getting into some free exchanges. Suddenly there was a loud knock and call at the door to the room we were in. I rose and opened the door. Two big Boston policemen were standing there. William froze. I jumped at the cops demanding to know what they were doing in the house without being invited.
I was aggressive. They were at fault and went on the defensive. The room stank of herbal smoke. I moved through the doorway, blocking them and sending them backwards. They were on their heels muttering about looking for two little girls in nightshirts from a slumber party next door.
“What!?” I said with a raised voice, moving them out the back door with my energy. “You walk in this house uninvited looking for little girls in pajamas?! They’re not here but we’ll help you look”. William was delighted. We walked across the yard helping the cops seek the girls, for about two minutes. Then Tim returned with a big take-out dinner, happy to see William smiling and for the moment at ease in America.
THE CITY KILLER DOCKS IN BOSTON HARBOR
Throughout the year Ann and I continued to visit Tim’s house. I knew of his work in the prison system. There were dangers with the drug but important potential for therapy. Various applications were explored.
Later in the year LSD entered the scene. There were visits by Alan Watts and Arthur Koestler. I somehow never connected with Richard Alpert (Ram Das), who had been Tim’s teaching assistant, but I was well-connected with both Tim and Frank. Once Tim and I took mescaline together, sitting by ourselves in a room for hours. That was a mostly nonverbal session. I thought we were both experiencing an acceleration of history and awareness.
Sometime in 1960 Peter pulled into Boston harbor on a guided missile nuclear destroyer, a “city killer”. Peter was 5th in command, responsible for precise hits on cities of “enemy” nations. Peter was lost. Finding Ann and I in Boston then was magic for him.
The very night he arrived was remarkable. He drove directly to the house where Ann and I were living on Beacon Hill. He was with another naval officer, a straight-laced guy but Peter’s good friend. The car was parked down in the street. The two naval officers were on their way to the guided missile destroyer in Boston Harbor. The car was packed with personal gear and a vital military black box assigned to Peter, a crucial part governing the entire missile system.
After a drink or two Peter said he wanted to visit his friend David, who was Peter’s roommate at the University of Michigan and lived in Boston. We squeezed into the car stuffed with gear and a military secret component and drove to David’s apartment on Park Avenue. We spent two hours drinking with David and then it was time to go. Out in the street we found that the car had been stolen!! Peter was going to be in serious trouble as he stepped aboard the new destroyer, and we hadn’t even introduced him to Tim Leary yet.
After things got calmed down on the ship, one day Peter invited us aboard for dinner, with the captain. It was impressive. There was no place to breathe but there was inconceivable technology, an electronic monument to the American military industrial complex. Peter, who we were all sure would be the great American poet when we were young, was lost in a city killer, responsible for strategic controls.
Nothing much happened with Tim and Peter when they did meet. Neither was impressed with the other. Peter was impressed with my poetry however. He made the grand statement that I was writing the poetry he wanted to write. He got depressed and sailed out of Boston.
THE PILLS BECOME POISON
The year ended with a crash for me. I was having one of my 6 pill poetry generation sessions, which had been fruitful and unproblematic on a once a week schedule. This time just minutes into the power ride something went wrong. I began to see only mutilated bodies, hellish disasters, twisting my mind.
I told Ann I was having a bad trip and I was going out to walk it off. I walked along the Charles River, for hours, in a state of profound paranoia and horror, yet able to walk through it. Finally most of the drug effect wore off, but for 10 days or so I was beset by paranoia, and even if I didn’t react to it the state was debilitating.
I went to see Tim. Alan Watts was there. Ideal, right? I had a chance to talk to them both about the downside of that drug experience. The downside was the opposite of liberation. It was self-inflicted sickness. Neither Tim nor Alan was of any help whatsoever. That’s where it ended. I recovered and went on. I never saw Tim again, but his story is well known.
Ann and I went back to New York to live in the land of artists and poets, and I felt the need to be both at once.
DEATH AND THEN LIFE IN THE INTERNATIONAL ART WORLD
When I first met Ann it was Greenwich Village, in 1959, and I was regularly reading my poems at the Gaslight Café, where Alan Ginsberg had recently read Howl, and where young Bob Dylan performed. After we moved back to New York back from Boston we found a classic 4 floor walk-up railroad flat directly across from St. Mark’s church, which was emerging as a world center of poetry.
We were close friends with John Giorno, who had become friends and more with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and other celebrated artists of the Leo Castelli gallery. John had been very smart; now he was becoming very hip. Robert Rauschenberg designed the cover for John’s first small book of poems: Death in America. It was the application of montage and ready-made language to poetry. It had some nasty sexual lines and a repetition echo technique.
Peter had managed to get himself discharged from the Navy essentially doing what I did to get out of the Army. He came to New York and moved in with Ann and me. Peter had a dear girlfriend from the University of Michigan, Marcia Stillman, who became my close friend too. And she was also good friends with John. Marcia sometimes stayed with us too.
For a while Peter and I were a dynamic duo, prone to long exploratory dialogues others would listen to. We clearly loved each other, but he got involved with chemical drugs, and conflict developed between us.
He stayed over less often. One night I told Ann I decided it was too hard for Peter to stay with us anymore. He had come over with a girl heavily drugged on heroin. She slept through 10 hours of conflict between Peter and me. We heard her breathing in the long silences, until 5am.
I was standing by the phone talking to Ann when the phone rang. It was Frances Stillman, Marcia’s sister. Marcia had fallen from her eighth story Park Avenue bedroom window and was crushed on the concrete in the courtyard below. - I had once sat on Marcia’s bedroom window ledge after we had finished a bottle of champagne, and we watched as the empty bottle I dropped hit the pavement below and disappeared.
I went into the room where Peter was standing, near the sleeping girl. He watched me intently as I walked toward him and put my arms out and held him. Head to head I told him Marcia was dead. I said, “Do you want to know how?” He said, “No. I know.” I said nothing. I don’t think he did know. He said he thought I was going to attack him when I approached him. He left with the girl and disappeared for years.
I had a severe reaction to Marcia’s violent death. My nerves were quaking for about three days as Ann held on to me. Several times we started to go to the ER in St. Vincent’s hospital, but we hung in and waited it out.
The day after I calmed down I went to see a kind old doctor. He said that my reaction was an understandable response to the violent death of someone close. I was grateful to him. He didn’t prescribe anything.
John on the other hand had a different response. He asked his uncle who worked for the New York Police Department to get a copy of the official death photograph of Marcia, the body laying crushed on the concrete, in a pool of blood, partly covered by a blanket. He brought the photo to his buddy Andy Warhol who made John an elegant 8 foot by 10 foot vertical silkscreen-on-canvas montage complex, 9 restatements of the photo in varying shades of black and white. John called me up with some excitement and said he had something to show me. I came over and looked. I disliked the elegant arty play with her death image. John chuckled.
THE ADVANCE OF ART IN AMERICA
Peter went to India and stayed in drug scenes and Buddhist monasteries, alternatively. John and I became progressively involved with the use of language in new formats. From 1964 on I directed mid-town New York art galleries and wrote for the art magazines. It was a time when the arts were interactive. Many gifted people participated in each other’s work. John starred in Andy Warhol’s movie “Sleep”, 60 minutes of John sleeping. We participated in “happenings”.
Early in 1963 there was buzz about two Soviet writers being imprisoned because of acting too free. Jackson MacLow, a leading avant-garde poet, organized a protest demonstration outside the Russian embassy, in mid-Manhattan, with police on horseback and additional riot police, in steady rain. Under an awning, one by one poets read their poems into a microphone. It was otherwise very quiet. I waited.
When all were finished I stepped up to the microphone and addressed the Russian embassy: “In my right hand I hold 2 papers of importance to the Soviet government. One concerns the major Chinese spy in America; the other concerns a key Soviet counteragent. I offer both papers to the Soviet government in exchange for the two imprisoned writers. I will read one of the poems.” I read a cool poem about the chief Chinese spy in America. There was some laughter even among the police. Jackson immediately asked for the poem to publish it.
THE LIVING THEATER AND NUCLEAR THEATER
At 8th Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan was the four story theater building owned by Julian Beck and Judith Molina, founders of The Living Theater. They developed a troup of dynamic actors who lived, created, and worked together. Several New York poets were close with them.
I worked with both Julian and Judith on the second World-Wide General Strike for Peace. That consisted of a full page ad in the Nation making our anti-military/industrial establishment statement and reminding the world of the true foundations of liberty and democracy. We also made a public demonstration in which Julian gave a talk that I found luminous, sane, humane, and daring.
Julian was the most noble of men in my eyes. He was a slender and fine man. Police on horseback attacked our demonstration. I was agonized to see a big cop smash Julian’s bald head with his nightstick. There was blood. We were explicitly nonviolent. We understood the risks but knew we had to demonstrate some kind of action against the forces that had made life so endangered.
At our small celebration after our “worldwide strike for peace” 23 year old Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are A’Changin and It’s a Hard Rain Gonna Fall.
I decided to make a direct statement against nuclear proliferation. With Ann’s support, we stood outside the door to the Atomic Energy Commission building in lower Manhattan and gave out a single printed page to those entering the building. We stated the fact that employee collaboration was what made the AEC work, and I asked that employees resign in protest against the military control of atomic energy. Can you believe we did that? Soon there appeared two well-dressed FBI guys. They asked me for my name and address. I was glad to tell them, alive with the liberty of my political action.
LENNY THE LOON
For the young people of America, the Atomic Age brought about the search for drugs and other means that might change the situation from the inside. Getting high on drugs brought you into the high culture, and with it came the first comic of the hip, Lenny Bruce. Ann and I enjoyed his first record:
“Cut to a toy store, any toy store, anywhere in the United States. A kid comes in, takes a Tailspin Tommy comic book, goes up to the counter and says, I’ll take the comic and six jars of airplane glue, please. The store owner says,’ I hope you can sleep tonight Mister Schneider.’” Lenny made voices for the kid and the store owner.
I spoke to Judith Molina of the Living Theater about Lenny. She said yeah he was intense. She said he was supposed to do a benefit performance for the Living Theater but it became impossible. The compensation Lenny wanted was 5 different drugs, two of which even Judith had never heard of.
One night Ann and I decided to go see Lenny in a New York City club where he was performing. It wasn’t a funny act. He mostly made comments about the Kennedy assassination and the Life Magazine article about it, which he was showing the audience, passionately.
After his act I approached him. He was fast talking with a wise guy who seemed to be his agent. I introduced myself to Lenny, and he shook my hand. He was good looking and vibrated with his shoes just touching the ground. I said, “Lenny, here’s one you gotta do, a hip Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
The wise guy agent shoved a quarter at me and said, “Get lost kid” – but Lenny put his arm out and stopped him, saying to me, “Robert, I’m sorry but I’m just not mature enough to perform comedy suggested by someone else.” Sweet. However, a year later he put out a new comedy album and on it was a scenario about a hip Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Then Lenny got busted by the police for obscenity, and he spent the rest of his short life doing something that wasn’t funny, raging against the police and government in his performances. He had become a known hip comic but he lost his sense of humor.
He did a special show at an old movie theater on Second Avenue, two blocks from where Ann and I were living. There was a lot of buzz in New York around the show. The theater was packed beyond capacity. Ann and I were jammed high up in the balcony. Lenny was over an hour late and the place was loud and wild. There were police outside and inside.
Finally Lenny arrived and started speaking into the microphone but the sound was so weak and the acoustics were so bad it was hard to hear any words he said. It was mostly muffled sound. Lenny got louder, raging against the police, who were visible, but his words were mostly boom boggle. At all times the audience was louder than Lenny. He moved around on the stage, shouting at the audience, trying to be heard, pointing to legal papers he had been served with. The frustration level increased. It went on for about an hour until the cops stopped the show, with Lenny raging into the audience and at the cops.
He died shortly afterwards from an overdose of heroin, falling off the toilet in his bathroom, the needle in his arm. And thus humor that once came to him with being high was then lost on the floor of an Atomic Age bathroom.
THE COOL BLUE SUN
In the summer of 1965 I had a job as a poet working with mostly black children in Harlem. The program was called Summer in the City and operated out of a Catholic church on 137th Street. It was blazing hot every day. We were working on having a parade. We were going to make a float for the parade. I had about 14 kids ranging from maybe 7 to 12. I gathered them and said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna make the cool blue sun”. “Really,” I said. “Think about it. Look at that hot sun burning down on us. What do we do? We make a big round ball, like a big snowball. We let it dry in the hot sun and then we paint it cool blue. We ride with it raised up in a truck in the parade, with COOL BLUE SUN signs on both sides of the truck. It’s a joke, get it?”
They did. I brought a big beach ball which we used as the core, and we just kept packing paper mache all around the ball, making it round all around. It was messy fun and everyone worked on it, building our cool blue sun. It took three hours to build and smooth round and three hours to dry, and then we had a big dry grey ball and a can of glossy bright blue spray paint.
And so it was that some of the kids rode on a truck with the cool blue sun held up on a stand, with our signs on the side of the truck. It was a good joke in a hard Harlem summer. You could feel how hard it was.
THE PRIEST AND THE APE
Father Harvey was a young priest who sometimes went with us on trips.
The day we went to the Bronx zoo we took him along. It’s a huge place. We walked up to where several large dramatic ostrich birds were standing. As we approached, one of them turned and walked toward us. It was as big as the priest, it had a big head with two intense eyes, larger than human eyes, and it headed directly to the priest. The ostrich’s body looked unhealthy. Many feathers were broken off showing raw body. The priest was transfixed and obviously having an intense experience. The big bird went right up to the fence we were looking through and went face to face with Father Harvey. We all watched as the bird hypnotized him and then walked away. I swear this is true.
I asked the two oldest kids to each hold one of Father Harvey’s hands and hold onto him as we went into the house of great apes. Inside we came immediately to the cage of an enormous orangutan. She was upside-down against the back of the cage with a carrot coming out of her mouth and her eyes were darting from side to side watching big water beetles scurry on the floor. When she saw us she turned over and took two big steps across the cage to where we were. She bent down to us and looked right into the Father Harvey’s face. Then she reached under herself with her right hand, took something from her ass or cunt, smelled it and offered it to the priest. I really thought he might collapse, so we turned him around and slowly walked him back to the car. Everyone else had a good time.
BRION GYSIN AND THE INGENIUS LAMP
In 1966 John Giorno and I were each living on East 9th street, a few buildings apart, in a neighborhood containing artists and poets. One day John called me on the phone to see if I could come over and meet Brion Gysin. I said yes. I knew that John had been close friends with William Boroughs and Brion for years.
I told Brion that I had had seen a work of his in the window of the American Bookstore in Paris and I really liked it. I described it as a lamp with a soft gold lamp shade that revolved slowly around a light bulb - with small calligraphic figures cut into the lamp shade, unique luminous energy figurations for your brain, perhaps to free conditioned patterning. I said something like that. Brion said that it was an excellent description.
John wanted to play an audio tape that Brion had made. Brion said it wouldn't be good unless we had some good pot. I said I had some in my apartment, went home for 5 minutes, returning with three big joints.
The audio pieces were interesting. Brion had recorded his voice statements and edited them into short experimental sound poems, using repetition. John was to adopt those sound techniques and the cut-up technique in his language work.
Then I told John and Brion the story of the night I spent with William Boroughs at Tim Leary's house in Boston. William and Brion had lived together in Morocco for many years, where the cryptic lampshade was cut.
For years William worked in his room, writing, while Brion produced a variety of projects including newspaper cut-ups, and some very interesting work that has disappeared. I was glad John was close friends with them both.
SHOCK IN THE DEER PARK
Between 1963 and 1969 I spent several summers on Monhegan Island, 8 miles off the coast of Maine. I rented a cabin on the edge of the island’s interior pine forest, near “Cathedral Woods”. The eastern side of the island was dominated by three prominent silver rock cliffs, White Head, Burnt Head, and Black Head. They each rose more than 100 feet above the ocean, which sometimes crashed powerfully against the rock, sending spume flying way up the cliffs. But in the summers it was mostly calm.
White Head, the central prominence, more than 150 feet above the water, was an ideal place to watch the sun rise, facing due East across the Atlantic Ocean. In fact the great physical beauty of White Head coupled with its due East orientation makes White Head a power place. So are the interior forests of the island.
One day I was sitting in the woods in a teepee that some boys had built and abandoned. I liked to sit just inside the doorway and write. As I was writing two deer came along, a beautiful male and female couple, about two years old. They were slowly eating their way along in what looked like free movement. I could see they were free.
They didn’t sense me in the teepee and I stayed still. They stopped about ten feet away. And then she did something to him so beautiful I wish it on every male of every species to make them peaceful. She licked him in a long sweep of her tongue, through his fur, across his left flank. And then she brought her head back to where she began and she licked him again all across his left side. And then she gracefully brought her head back and she licked him again, and again, and again, clearly getting pleasure from caressing him that way. And the buck held still while he took the licking, looking around to see if any edible plants were near enough to get to without moving his legs.
Suddenly something shocking happened. In a flash my heart was beating hard in my chest. About 100 feet away was the grandfather grandmaster deer of all time. It was very big for a deer, a big body and big head with massive antlers, a white beard, and big piercing eyes looking right at me. It was not an elk. It was more unusual, a very old, very large, very conscious deer.
He saw me quickly from 100 feet away while the younger deer didn’t sense me from close range. I wanted him to come near but my heart was making enough noise to scare him off. The other two deer left. I knew that I might have only another second or two of encounter with the great deer. As we looked directly at each other I was hoping for a magical communiqué. And something psychic happened to me. A memorable flash. Then he turned around and went away. That was not an ordinary deer; I think he gave initiation.
I never saw him again.
SOFT SHOCK IN THE WOODS
One day I was walking slowly along, deep in the woods, when I stopped cold in my tracks. About 50 feet away, looking directly at me, was a young woman sitting in meditation posture. I stood still and we continued to look directly into each other’s eyes. It was a moment of stillness and calm.
There were two options. Either I leave her alone to meditate and I walk on, or I go over to her and sit down, and we speak. We watched each other for about thirty long seconds, and then I carefully went over to her to meet.
She was red headed, physically beautiful, with an excellent voice and laugh. Her name was Gail Varsi, from California, recently separated from her husband, a promising California poet. Gail was on the East Coast visiting her sister Diane, the actress who made five movies for 20th Century Fox before she was 20 and then left Hollywood to go to college at Bennington, in Vermont. Diane lived in Brooklyn at that time with her two children.
Gail and I didn’t talk long in the woods. I was in a solitary mood. She asked me where I lived. I said, ironically, in a cabin at the edge of the woods. There were several such cabins on the island, but I wasn’t expecting a visit.
I took a particularly long walk in the woods, wending back to my cabin. As I arrived, there was Gail, knocking at my door. “How did you possibly find this cabin”, I asked her. “You told me where it was,” she said, looking all the way into my eyes.
Gail and I became close fast. She introduced me to Diane and then went back to the West Coast to settle things with her young husband. I didn’t know when I’d see her again, but I felt a perfect connection with her. Meanwhile I also connected with Diane. Fact is that woman was so stunningly beautiful as well as smart that since she was warm and friendly with me I got excited. But it turned out that it wasn’t me Diane was meant for. Believe it or not, it was Russell.
STUPIDITY AND THE NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
One day I left my apartment on 9th Street to go to work. I was an editor for the director of the Fine Books division of Holt, Winston & Rinehart, the 4th largest publisher. I was wearing a suit and necktie under a raincoat. It was marvelously snowing heavily as I left my building. Heavy snow in Manhattan is rare and transformational. It makes the hard city soft, purified with big white crystals coming down fast. I was carrying an umbrella, folded under my arm, reading a letter I took from my mailbox on the way out.
Going into Thompkins Square Park, on my way to the subway station, I noticed that there were many black and Puerto Rican guys in the park, and some of them were throwing snowballs hard at old Polish people who liked to sit in the park. Right in front of me a high school aged kid smashed an old Polish man with a big clump of packed snow. Involuntarily I shouted at him, “Hey, are you crazy doing that?”
Suddenly, like I had said the magic words, everything stopped. Many guys were looking at me. The kid I yelled at got energy from his associates, and said to me, “Yeah mister. I’m crazy. Do you want to do something about it?”
There was no time to think. I knew I had walked into a lion’s den. I quickly made my umbrella into a weapon, facing god-knows-what guns and knives in the tough group I’d engaged. Mustering all the quick wisdom I could find, I shifted my body and gaze so that I was facing the field in general, and I made the boldest move I ever made. I faced the field with force and I said, “Okay, one of you guys come out,” taking a step toward them and standing like a tiger. No one moved, for a crucial 2 or 3 seconds, while my life was in the balance. I had used wit to save myself from my stupidity. I had commanded the field for the crucial moment. I turned, and walked away, taking only one snowball on the way out. Stupid and lucky, but don’t engrave that on my tombstone.
SAVING RUSSELL FROM HIS GUN
At that time Russell was living in New York, not too far from East 9th Street where John Giorno and I lived. Russ was working for a prominent architecture firm. One day he came pounding at my door. I let him in. He had on a long coat with the collar turned up and his 357 magnum in his coat pocket. He was very nervous. He said the cops might be after him any minute.
What happened was that it was a cold day and Russ turned on the gas oven in his kitchen forgetting that he stored his loaded gun in there. He heard people’s voices in the courtyard below. Russ went to the window, opened it, and looked down. Down in the courtyard there were police and a dead body, with a white outline sprayed around it. Russ thought the cops might suspect him because of his gun, which he forgot was cooking in the oven. Suddenly the gun went off!!
Russ hit the floor terrified that he’d be caught by the cops or killed by his own gun. The cops had to hear it. He crawled cautiously toward the stove to try to prevent the gun from firing again but it fired again. Imagine how loud and dangerous that was. The bullet had fired in Russ’s direction. Then the gun stopped, for about 10 seconds. He grabbed it from the stove. The barrel had bent and it was hot. He got it into his coat pocket. He desperately tried direct escape from his building and succeeded. He ran to where I lived. He calmed down a little and left the twisted gun with me, still unsure if they’d be looking for him. Three days later we threw the gun off the Brooklyn Bridge, a very small step toward world peace.
RUSS EMERGES AS A FILM ARTIST AND MARRIES A STAR
Then he pulled himself together again for a time. He moved to his own little studio building. He bought a 16 mm movie camera and started shooting. He was good right away. He shot a short movie of Sean Connery, who was making a James Bond movie that was set by chance right next to where Russell lived. As Russ opened his front door that day and found a smiling Connery, well-lighted, looking at him, he knew his luck was changing.
When Russ’s nice little 10 minute movie, starring Sean Connery, was finished he invited friends to come to his studio to see it. I invited Diane Varsi. She came to my apartment on 9th Street wearing a black leather jacket and tight black slacks, with her long blond hair in braids, and the magic was in her that night. She was so present and whole at that moment that you could see a rare beauty in her. We walked through Thompkins’s Square Park to Russell’s studio house. As Russ opened his door and saw Diane he fell all out in love for the first time in his life.
I wrote a movie for them both, to bring out Russell’s visual talent and depths Diane wanted to express. She periodically had grand mal seizures. When acting, she brought out powerful images with simple movements.
It took a year. It was called Ring. It was a 45 minute work good enough to be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art film library. Diane and Russ did fall in love, and even got married. Russ, for the moment, was the most together he had ever been. But of course things have to change, and Russ had reasons to be paranoid.
BREAKING THROUGH
In 1966 I was keenly interested in innovations in 2, 3, and 4 dimensional visual art. Important changes were in the air. It was a time of experimentation in art and technology. The sense of a wide-open creative field seemed to energize the arts in general.
I was earning a modest living as director of the Spectrum Gallery, a large co-operative exhibition space on 57th Street, in the heart of the “art world.” Like several of my poet friends, I was an art critic. I wrote for Arts Magazine and the 57th Street Review, published by the Parsons Gallery.
As knowledgeable and interested as poets were in the innovations in the visual arts, many of us were entering new domains in our own work with language. A number of us began to emerge as dual verbal and visual talents. I had been producing photomontage art since 1965, much like visions cinema creates with digital effects now. My image work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and other museums.
[photo]
I still considered language my primary work and my image art secondary, in spite of the fact that some of my art critic poet friends considered my artwork better than my poetry.
I was more concerned with the poetry readings I gave and the publication of my poems, but my artwork was being shown in prominent NYC galleries and museums.
1966 was a pivotal year for me. Except for two long concrete poems, I stopped writing compositional poetry, the kind you stand up and read aloud, in public. I went private with my work. I began working on a book centered on photographs of eyes, mostly human. It was a process that was to take almost two years to perfect to my satisfaction.
The eyes were cut out of the context of the face in a horizontal strip 2 to 4 inches wide. Taking them out of their original context allowed me to work with what I saw in the eyes in another context. Above and below the eyes were words, serving as captions. You read the words above, which syntactically pivoted through the eyes, and you concluded in the caption below.
In working the words with the image, I was getting more precise meanings than I’d been able to work from language alone. The pages and the book size were 9 by 12 inches. The book looked like a human head with prominent eyes. On the cover, above my eyes, was the title, SIGNS. Below the eyes was my name. It was a simplified and precise use of language interrelated with image, as in advertising design, seeing into the human image.
In the process of evolving that dual verbal-visual form I worked with hundreds of images, many from excellent photographers. After about a year I showed a few pages to poet friends. I was told that I was penetrating to a new ground of language function in the form of the picture book I was working on. It was finished in May, 1967 and was featured in a Dwan Gallery exhibition called Language.
At the same time (1967- 68) I was working with words and photographs of the human face, I was also working with words on mirrors, getting language to function with living imagery, the live mirror image. The mirror work would need carefully-designed and controlled exhibition space, where the space and timing of the use of language and image was well-managed. There was no existing presentation format for such work at that time. I needed an exhibition space where language was a primary factor in the art.
I was very aware that various poet friends of mine were engaged in work best presented in a spatial format. In short, at that moment in history, poets needed an art gallery.
There was a studio space available for our purposes, definitely off the established gallery path. It was on East 81st Street, off Broadway. It was fated to be a successful off-Broadway art gallery, founded by poets. Since many of the art critics of the time were poets, and since many of them were interested in innovations in language and its relationship with visual processes, there was a good chance that such poets could bring such a gallery to life.
GAIN GROUND
The studio was at 269 East 81st Street, on the top floor of the building, the 7th floor, well above the street. The space was 40 feet by 40 feet in size, with an overhead skylight. It was leased by Naomi Dash, who became co-director with me, believing in the vision. At this point it just needed a name. It took me about 10 days. When it came, it came with a boom: Gain Ground. In reviewing our first one man show, John Perreault, a prominent art critic of that time, wrote that Gain Ground was the best name for an art gallery he’d ever heard.
After much preparation, in April, 1967, Gain Ground opened with a rocking first show, a large collection of art works made by poets. For that show, and for all the following Gain Ground documentation, I am indebted to the New Museum exhibition of 1981, “Alternatives in Retrospect,” curated by Jackie Apple. The catalogue, with an essay by Mary Delahoyd, is my source for much of the information that follows.
The first Gain Ground exhibition was called: Bookwork Art, Objects Made by Poets, Word Art, and Poet Visions. Among the talents represented were Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, Carol Berge, Charles Frazier, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Ron Gross, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Jackson MacLow, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Newman, John Perreault, Patricia Sloan, Hannah Weiner, and others.
John Giorno offered a silk-screened poster keyed on the repetition of the words “I’m tired of being afraid.”
I showed my first speaking mirror, catching your live image in the mirror with an inescapable caption:
HERE’S A LIVE PHOTOGRAPH OF YOU
HOWEVER YOU THINK YOU LOOK
There were some very gifted original works. The panorama of word-operative artworks was so rich that some visitors came two and three times to try to take it all in, over the 4 week installation period.
Besides works on the walls and free-standing works there were three reading tables with chairs. On one long table there were three artwork books, the first of that art form ever exhibited: my book SIGNS; Carol Skylark's brilliant 8 ½ by 11 inch book of exquisite cartoon-like drawings of human imagery with evocative hand-written legends; and a gifted book of cut-out words and images by Patricia Sloan. SIGNS was then exhibited at the Dwan Gallery in May 67.
ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC MIRRORS
A month later at Gain Ground I followed with an eight-chambered magic theater called Rooms with Electric Mirrors. You entered through silver satin curtains in the gallery door into the first chamber, the Magic Well. Before you was a round lucite table with a mirror center. Above and below the mirror on the lucite were the words
LOOKING DOWN INTO THE MAGIC WELL
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WILD IMAGES IN THE FACE
You approached the table edge and looked down into the mirror, and as you bent over the face in the mirror came up to you, from below, alive with species implications. You could see your ancestors and new faces as fast as you could see. You knew why there were so many wild images in the face.
You exited out the back of that chamber into a room of 7 glimmering silver satin chambers. Most people entered the chamber to the immediate left first. And there you were, well-lighted and framed raw in a live photograph machine consisting of a full-length mirror with words. The words were captions that caught your image:
LOOK WHO’S ALIVE
SEE WHO MOVES
The words alive and move worked with your live image to make you the dramatic subject of a work of pictorial art. And there were 7 other live photograph chambers in which, one by one, you were the dynamic subject.
POWER THRONE
In 1968 I produced another Gain Ground show reversing the subject-object relationship to get something alive in a work of art: Power Throne. The exhibition consisted of two rooms, for one person at a time, in which you were immersed in different fields of heart sound.
When it was your turn, an attendant guided you to the inner chamber and parted the curtains for you to enter a red fabric throne room. Two priestesses in ruby dresses came to you graciously to seat you in the power throne.
The throne itself was a transformed dentist's chair, with racks of electronic equipment behind it. A red velvet sash was placed across your chest and your hands were placed one over the other over your heart. What you didn't know was that you were holding a very fine electronic stethoscope over your heart, and concealed behind the throne was the technology called harmonic compression, developed by Bell Labs, that would help you hear in a new way.
After you were gently seated and unknowingly stethoscoped, you relaxed. The priestesses disappeared behind you to work the equipment sensitively. In the first phase you heard your heart beat coming from 4 speakers in the walls of the chamber, with more information audible in the heart sound than anyone had ever heard. The sound system was designed by Norman Dolff of Columbia Records and engineered by Phillips Electronics. There was an immediately perceptible feedback field.
Then the priestesses placed a pair of hi-tec head phones over your ears and you heard the full expression of your heart in your brain. After a minute a voice entered the electronic mix with your heart sound, a voice in harmonic compression, twice the speed as normal speech but with the same pitch as normal speech, so you hear twice as fast. And the words you hear help you know what is beating in your heart:
YOU WON'T KNOW WHAT THE BLOODHEART IN YOU IS FROM MEDICAL
DEFINITIONS OF THE HEART, BUT THE DIAGRAMS OF ITS ELECTRIC
TISSUE WORKS ARE GOOD TO HAVE. THE ELECTRIC MECHANICS OF
THE POWERFUL ORGAN ARE HOT INTANGIBLE, BUT IF SOMETHING
GOES WRONG THERE THE WHOLE BODY OF LIFE HAS THE PAIN.
WHO KNOWS WHAT'S WORKING MIRACLES RED ALL LIVE IN YOU.
WHAT RUNS YOUR ORGANS GLEAMING WITH WHAT THEY DO.
WHO KNOWS WHAT ELECTRIC LIQUIDS CREATE IN YOUR HEAD.
THE UNIVERSE IS EMPTY WITH WHATEVER BEAT YOU HAVE.
HOW SHOULD YOU KNOW THE SPEED OF YOUR FLESH IN ITS ACTION.
IS IT REALLY BEST TO NOT KNOW YOUR ELECTRIC RUSH.
HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR HEART VIBRATE SUPERNATURAL TISSUES.
OR DO YOU ONLY FEEL YOUR HEART WHEN YOU'RE FRIGHTENED.
OR WHEN YOU MAY BE A LITTLE WORRIED YOU'VE OVERPUMPED IT.
OR AREN'T YOU THE ONE WHO'S PUMPING YOUR INCREDIBLE FLESH.
YOU MUST BE THE ONE WHO'S ALIVE IN YOUR HEART IN THE THROBBING,
OR AREN'T YOU BEING WORKED IN THE HEART YOU HAVE.
YOUR HEART IS SO RICH WITH BLOOD YOU MAY BE ALL LOVE IN IT,
NO MATTER WHAT YOUR GENES ARE DESIGNED TO BEAR.
THE BLOODFLESH OF YOU MAKES ITS CORONARY MAJESTY,
SO WHATEVER YOU CAN CATCH YOUR HEART WITH YOU BETTER GET.
DON'T HOPE THAT SLEEP WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SOMETHING ELSE.
THE HEART BEATING IN YOU CAN GO EVEN FASTER IN SLEEP.
“…Two silent red-robed girls glide forward in the redness, seat you in a throne, place a red satin cloth on your chest that sets a concealed electronic stethoscope over your heart and from the speakers in the walls of the chamber you are surrounded by the sounds of your own heart beating steady erratic ever-changing hypnotic magnified beats, turning you inside out, making the chamber an enlargement of your body with you at its core…”
Kim Levin, Artnews, March, 1970
“…You are brought through several phases of a heartsound feedback system, encouraging psychic shift to the energies of your heart, to the sound energy mind of your heart…”
Carter Ratcliff, Art International, March, 1970
“Robert Newman’s Power Throne makes a very strong departure from Artaud by effecting a welcome return to the center theme, or ‘matrixed’ presentation…Human gesture punctuates the drama and modifies the effective dimensions of the performance area. All steps in your performance form are set and you complete them. The performance, the spectator-performer, and the author become one in live, nonrepeatable, majestic heart energy, which is THE WORK ITSELF.”
Rita Simon, Arts Magazine, March, 1969
At that time there was a respected art curator, Jim Harithas, who had been director of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC and who was a front-runner for the vacant position of director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jim had been told about my Rooms with Electric Mirrors show, but missed it. When he heard about Power Throne he came to New York to see it. He called a couple of days later and came over to hang out. He said that after he experienced Power Throne he gave a lecture on art history at Hunter College and spoke about my show, telling them it was “a turning point in art history, a major change of perspective.” He wanted to do the show at MOMA when he was appointed director, but that didn’t happen.
WOODSTOCK AT GAIN GROUND
Summer 1969 was vacation time for Gain Ground. The space wasn’t used much. I was upstate New York working on an optical sundial. Also upstate New York, about 50 miles south of where I was, from August 15-18th, the famous Woodstock music festival happened. About August 20th I returned to New York City and found that the largest studio on the same floor as Gain Ground was occupied by the people that had filmed the Woodstock Festival and now were working with great intensity to produce the movie. They were in dire need of more workspace. They came in to visit and talk to me as part of an inevitable move into our space. And so it was that the final editing of the successful movie was in reality done at Gain Ground, and that’s one Gain Ground installation that was like a gift from beyond. They paid us a lot of money for the use of our space for five weeks, money which helped keep Gain Ground going a little longer.
In her chronicle for the New Museum catalogue, “Alternatives in Retrospect” Mary Delahoyd concluded:
“After early spring 1970 the activity at Gain Ground ceased, but this alternative space continued to sponsor programs elsewhere in New York.
A performance with installation by Juan Downey and a program of works by various poet film-makers took place at the Cinematique…Despite the transient dimension of these last events sponsored by Gain Ground, this place had provoked a new symbiosis of verbal and visual expression.”
THE SKY MIRROR SUNDIAL AND THE GALAXY
1970 was a pivotal year for me. I had been in the Gurdjieff “Work” since 1967 and had used it to confuse my art flow. I saw my creative passion as egoism and I stopped creating. Then my mentor in the Work had an insight and put me together with Martin Benson, then in his 80s, said to be Gurdjieff’s most realized student. He was kind of an artist. He had just finished directing a team of people to help him build a classical aeolian harp. It was a thing of beauty, responding to air movement with octaves of living air song within and beyond human hearing range.
He took a good look at me and said, “Bells, Buddhist bells. You should study that.” Mr. Benson found books on bell making and Buddhist bells for me, asking me to study them and draw bell forms. Interesting. In 1974, in Colorado, I was to direct a team of four people to produce Buddhist hand bells.
Someone in the Gurdjieff Foundation mentioned that it would be good to have a sundial at the estate where we “worked” on weekends. In a flash I saw something. My art flow had been stopped for months but I couldn’t stop this one. I saw a sundial made of light-responsive materials, instead of the typical metal or stone sundials. I saw a mirror about 36 inches in diameter with a large cut prism on the surface, with its apex about 9 inches high. The angles of the prism would be based on the latitude and longitude of the site the dial was made for. Clear plastics had become available that could be milled with great precision and would not deteriorate through years of exposure to the sun.
In order that the gnomon prism could cast a visible time-telling shadow on the mirror surface, I had to spray-paint the mirror surface silver in exactly the form defined by the time of solar movement for the sundial location. Since I’d never made a sundial I thought it would be right to build one for practice before we built one for the Work.
Rick Sharpe of the math department at Princeton did the math. Arturo Cuetara, a very gifted artist working in Lucite, cut the time-telling prism on a Bridgeport milling machine with Rick watching. I sprayed the specific silver form on the mirror, the form Rick defined as the total path of movement of the gnomon’s shadow throughout the year. It looked like a gate to the sky that was reflected in the mirror. I cut the hour lines through the painted form with a razor blade. It really did tell the time accurately, with a bold prismatic response to the rays of the sun.
The optical sundial photographed beautifully. Various film studies and still photos were made. I had stepped back from the art world for the moment but I was very glad we accomplished this fine collaboration. I showed some of the photos of the sundial to Mr. Benson. He studied them. Someone else standing near said, “What’s that?” “What’s that? What’s that?” Benson responded. “That’s Robert Newman’s sundial. That’s the galaxy. That’s our aspiration.” That’s the best review of one of my artworks I’ve ever had.
Also in 1970 I met the dynamic and compelling Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in New York City. He was 35 years old, handsome, well-dressed in a western suit. He looked like a sacred incarnation Tibetan prince to my eyes. After a seminar he gave I had an interview with him that was powerful for me. We agreed to work together.
Rinpoche had just come to America and had started to attract people, including various poets and artists, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and myself among them. Rinpoche was very interested in my art work and was warm and open to me. I showed him a film study of the sundial. Mid-film he turned to me and said sincerely, “It’s very beautiful.”
Later he said that I should be very careful about meditation, to never let it stop my flow as an artist. He said that many poets and artists had been approaching him, many of them becoming his students. He said “They’re all imitating the magician. You are a magician. Don’t mess it up with meditation.”
I did opt for the intensive study and practice of meditation under his direction for 10 years, and art and language projects kept emerging.
What I didn’t anticipate was that the Vipashyana meditation that I learned, mindful/awareness meditation, was to become accepted by the medical establishment as practical mind/body medicine. And I didn’t anticipate that the language I would develop to transmit Buddhist methods for medical and childbirth applications, 1997-2014, would be some of the best and most satisfying work I was to achieve. In 1970, with Trungpa Rinpoche, I was starting to learn methods which would be essential to my work in mind/body medicine.
COMEDY AND BLACK FLIES IN THE SHRINE ROOM
Trungpa Rinpoche’s meditation center in Vermont was called Tail of the Tiger in 1970. Now it’s Karma Choling. It was a big old wooden farm house. The largest room on the second floor was used as the shrine room. There were extended periods of sitting meditation. With no screens on the windows the place was full of black flies in the summer months. The flies were friends of meditation.
You’d be trying to sit, to shift your attention from your mind to your awareness, with patience and perseverance, and there would always be at least 6 or 7 black flies walking on your arms, face, and feet. If you tried to whack a fly you looked uncool, even disturbed. We didn’t kill insects. But then you quickly learned that they didn’t bite. They just walked around on you like an itch for 10 or 12 seconds and flew on, but there were always some on you, on your eyelids looking into your eyes, on your lips trying to get into your mouth, on and in your ears. And you learned to not react to the flies as you learned to not react to your mind. Today I imagine that shrine room to be screened and air conditioned, but I believe that black flies are the way to go.
How much can you ignore the flies? One day we were sitting in a meditation session when suddenly there was a hilarious incident. A very tall very loud poet had fallen sound asleep while meditating and actually keeled all the way over, crashing against the metal baseboard on the wall. You had to be very big and very asleep to keel over that far and hard, and you had to hit that metal unit at the bottom of the wall to make that big a crash. Generally in the shrine rooms you had to be careful for outbreaks of giggles, which can be contagious, but the poet crash was so funny that laughter came back in waves for more than an hour, until lunch. Truth is, I’m still chuckling over that one, part of the intensive training I went through.
OPENING GREAT WALLS
In the summer of 1970 there was a lot of buzz in the SOHO art gallery district. A big renovation project caught the eyes of the local gallery establishments and the artists. The world’s largest art gallery was being built. The rumor was it didn’t have an art director yet. It was called the Reese Palley Gallery. Reese offered the director job to Jim Harithas. Jim told Reese that he’d only take the job in unison with me and a woman curator he knew from Washington. Reese said fine. Just before the galley was to open Jim got very upset over something said about him in Time Magazine and he refused to commit to Reese.
The gallery finally had its grand champagne opening. More than a thousand people attended according to the New York Times. A good but unexceptional show of large abstract paintings was on the walls, chosen by Reese. It was a very festive occasion, celebrating a big new art gallery space. When I arrived it was jammed. It was hard to see, hard to get through. I did see a young couple in the crowd fucking against a pillar.
Suddenly someone grabbed my arm. It was Reese’s primary advisor, Harry.
“We’ve been looking for you,” he said. He took me to Reese’s office and locked the door behind us. Reese said, “Do you realize how crazy this is for me? Jim Harithas won’t commit. He’s angry at the world. Can you take over?” I said, “Yes, don’t worry, but I’ve got to speak to Jim.”
Leaving Reese’s office and reentering the crowd in the gallery was good theater for me. The first floor exhibition space with its 20 foot high ceiling was the grandest in New York, and lost in the crowd I was secretly the director. There were several magnificent show walls.
That night I envisioned the first show: Opening Great Walls. I knew several artists, including myself, who would love that creative challenge – but it wasn’t meant to happen. Chaos ensued. I left for a teaching position in the City University of New York (CUNY) on Staten Island. Eventually Jim did take the job. I focused on my own art work, meditation, and teaching.
I’ve been told a little about my birth from my parents and sister, and then there’s what I still remember and know! It’s time to tell.
It took place in a Brooklyn, New York hospital, October 22nd, 1935. It was noon. Mom was 21 and had a beautiful slender figure with narrow hips, the kind women might pray for except when it comes to childbirth. The labor was long and painful. My mother was lying alone, neither her mother nor her husband was with her during labor. She asked a nurse for help. The nurse was annoyed and said, “Here read this magazine.” So I was stuck squeezed painfully between Mom’s slender hips trying to read a magazine.
Then they gave Mom what my sister calls ether. I’m told what was common practice at that time was the application of “twilight sleep”, insensitivity to pain without complete loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of morphine and scopolamine. So I was born drugged from a heavily drugged young woman. It was really high noon.
I remember my soft skull being pulled hard by steel tongs, bruising my head. My father saw the red mark on my head in the nursery and he said, “I hope he’s alright.” I am, in that there was no apparent lasting birth trauma, but in all the numbness and unknown dimensions of my birth my mother mostly missed the event and I’m still trying to wake up.
Many years ago when my mother’s memory was still good she swore to me that I spoke my first words when I was 9 months old. She said that she was cooking in the kitchen with me in the high-chair when she suddenly heard the words, “Be careful.” She turned and looked around thinking that maybe it was the radio, but the radio was off. Mom looked at me and then went back to cutting vegetables. Again I said, “Be careful.” Sounds like I was parroting back words she’s said to me. And given how absolutely dangerous the world has turned out to be, “Be careful” also makes for good last words
Looking at photos I can see that as a toddler I was very healthy, better than alright. I had curly platinum blond ringlets of hair and energetic blue eyes.
Once when I was crawling around the apartment I found one of Mom’s steel hairpins, with its two prongs. I noticed the electric socket nearby, with its two holes. I decided for the play of it to insert the hairpin prongs into the two holes in the electric socket. And so I did. BAM. Big electric jolt, straightening out my ringlets of hair into lines of electric radiation. I yelled and pulled back my hand. My curls couldn’t rewind for hours.
Looking back, I’m kinda glad I did it, like a little magician trying to wake himself up.
When I was four there was a big event. My mother had a baby. Mom was in the same hospital I was born in. I was staying with my grandma and grandpa across the street from where my mother and father and I lived. We got a phone call that my mother and father were coming back from the hospital with a baby girl.
We went down to the street to wait for the cab. It arrived. Grandma opened the back door gently. My mother was waiting with a little girl in her arms. My sister had wide open blue eyes looking right into my eyes. We met. We held the gaze. I had a sister, a conscious baby. There was some kind of recognition that still intrigues me.
When it was time to go to school, kindergarten, first day, I walked down the street holding hands with Peter who was holding his mother’s hand. As we walked toward the school I went head-on into a telephone pole, bang, right between the eyes, and I woke up.
After kindergarten the United States entered World War II in Europe and in Asia. I grew up with the sense of world wide tragedy, and then by 1944 there was the sense that I was living in a bomb target. My father would go out at night with a plastic helmet and a flash light in air raid drills. We kept it pitch dark inside. Sirens would sound. It was thought that German rockets and bombs might get to us, like they got London. There was a sense of death and destruction around the world. People wondered if the Germans had built the atomic bomb. It was the beginning of my insecurity. I had no future.
After the wars were over the Russians exploded atomic bombs. The New York newspapers dramatically showed New York City as an atomic bomb target. In school we were made to hide from an atomic bomb under our desks. I woke up. I was free.
EARLY SEX EDUCATION
When I was about six I was playing with friends when we saw a smaller dog with a very big penis climb onto the back of a bigger female dog, right next to where we were standing. It was amazing. I’ll never understand how he got his thing into her except that she liked it and helped him make it work. He got his big thing all the way up into her and then he started jackpumping her. Dotty, who was watching with us, had to run home for something, down the block. The little male dog just kept going, and the big bitch looked locked-in with him. It was fascinating.
Then the male dog stopped and pulled back. His red penis hung down. We watched it shrink as the bitch scratched herself and walked away. I ran fast as I could to Dotty’s house to tell her. I burst onto her porch and just as I was about to say what I saw I noticed Dotty’s mom standing there. I changed my blurt-out mid-sentence: “The small dog is shrinking! It’s half the size and getting smaller!” “What?” said Dotty’s mom, as Dotty and I ran back to see, but the dogs were gone. I knew what I said sounded absurd but it worked for the moment, and it would turn out that I’d have a gift for wild humor.
Later that summer I was standing with my uncle Ralph and Aunt Stell who at that time had a brick summer beach house a few doors down from my family’s little beach house. We were all going to the beach for the afternoon. We were in our bathing suits. Aunt Stell was wearing a two piece suit, a bra top and a little skirt bottom.
Then she said that she forgot something and turned around to go back up the 10 brick steps into her house. As she turned and started up the steps, Ralph and I turned to watch and wait for her. We both saw that she had forgotten to put on the bottom of her bathing suit under her little skirt, and Ralph and I got a great view of her private parts going up the steps, dark crevices and hair. Ralph smiled. “That’s my girl,” he said. We both smiled.
GROWING UP WITH UNPRECEDENTED DANGERS
When I was about seven, I was playing with my three year old sister on the ocean beach when a big wave came all the way up and went over us. I managed to pull myself up out of it but my little sister was gone, sucked under. I screamed and pointed. My mother came in a flash, dove into the water, and somehow saved my little sister. I got an intimate sense of how immense and dangerous the world was. I noticed in our nice neighborhood that there was fear in the streets at night. There were no gangs, but there was news of some criminal acts, again giving the sense of many dangers as the cold war continued.
One night when I was about 12 I went to bed to go to sleep and instead I woke up completely. There was nothing but awareness and vast space without time. The experience stunned me and stays with me all these years later. It feels like awareness before and after death.
MY FIRST COMIC ACT
Even though some day I would become known to be outrageous, at the age of 12 I had done almost nothing wild and my mother was the least wild person I knew. My father could tap dance well and liked to tell jokes and entertain the kids, but mom was quiet for some reasons. She could laugh but she never joked.
One day Mom and I were in a big department store in Brooklyn where I saw a charming toy. As a child I got the things most boys got, most memorably my baseball gloves, and a bike, and sister Pat did have various dolls, but in the department store we came upon a large stuffed ape that was a kind of puppet. You held it up by a leash and it walked alongside you. It was well- made, with black simulated fur and big live-looking glass eyes that seemed to follow you. My amusement with the ape was contagious, and the big toy was so cute that my mother decided to buy it just for fun. She did, and was delighted as I walked the ape out of the department store, catching smiles from everyone, all the way to where we had parked the car. I knew I’d be giving it to Pat. Stell’s rare wildness in supporting my first comic act is a sweet memory.
SPONTANEOUS ACT OF HEALING/CARE
My father was a simple man, with only a high school education, with almost no aspiration except to provide for his family. He had no confidence in his ability to communicate and kept his emotions to himself. He was a shoe salesman on the first floor of the Empire State Building until I was about 12.
Then he bought and sold used office equipment the rest of his life. He had a fast gait when he walked. He used to exhale out his stress. I remember him blowing air out sometimes, over the years, and I knew he was trying to blow off stress, unconsciously.
Once he took me with him when he went to see the doctor about something. Typically there was no talk whatsoever about why he was seeing the doctor. We were led into the doctor’s office but he was in another room at that moment. While we waited, I walked up to my father from behind and began to give him a back-scratch, something I’d never done to anyone nor had I ever seen any kind of bodywork done. He deeply appreciated it, and leaned forward so I could get to all of his back, which I did, until the doctor arrived.
I never found out what the visit to the doctor was about, but that was my first bodywork experience, and in the years to come I was to develop a bodywork practice.
I kept voluntarily doing bodywork, massage, until I got good enough so that friends who were professional bodywork practitioners – craneosacral, Swedish, and deep tissue / energy work – would trade work with me and I would pick up good practices from then. Later on, after I had various healing practice empowerments from my Tibetan lamas, I did bodywork on doctors and nurses using deep tissue massage as a basis for energetic healing work.
THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE MEDAL AND THE DOLPHINS
In elementary school I was an average student. We routinely had bomb drills in which we had to hide under our desks and cover our faces with our hands as bomb drill alarms rang. Other than that nothing really remarkable happened for me in elementary school. I did like a girl named Patricia who once showed me how she could do the split, right there on the hallway floor, wearing a short skirt. She sat next to me in class. I was starting to learn girls.
Once I put a thumb tack on her seat just as she was sitting down. She shot right back up with a little shriek. The teacher looked at me and said, “Is that you, Newman?” I said yes and got a mark for being bad. But it turns out I was good! At graduation, the last day of elementary school, something interesting happened.
While I was sitting among the boys of my class during the graduation ceremony, a couple of medals were awarded. One was the History and Civics medal. From the microphone on stage they called out, “Robert Newman”. I didn’t move. I didn’t understand. What did I do to win the award? My classmates were impatiently telling me to go up on stage. Those few seconds of suspension were remarkable. It was living theater. Really, what was happening?
That summer I had an unforgettable experience. I was floating in a rubber tube out just beyond where the waves started forming when suddenly I saw 4 or 5 sets of big dark fins headed right toward me. With no time to think I hoped it wasn’t a group of sharks and I tried to stand up on the tire to save my legs and let the threat pass under me. But in a flash they were upon me and they were dolphins! They nuzzled me a little and went by. I was stunned. Knowing how dangerous the world was I was lucky to survive, but then again, those dolphins may have been a good sign for me.
ME AND CHARLIE THE KILLER
We lived in a little house on East 22nd Street in Brooklyn all the years that I went to elementary school and then high school. A block down from where we lived Charlie Lindbaugh lived. He was too big for his age and he was mean. When he was 10 years old he killed a friend of his father with a pipe. Smashed his head. They put Charlie away for two years and then they let him out. He went to the elementary school I went to. He used to go past my house every day.
When we were both 12 years old I was making myself some breakfast when I saw Charlie out the back window, milling around in our garage. He had a rope with him. He had been pulling a rubber tire down the street and he turned into our driveway, pulling the tire into our garage, which was open, and I knew we had some loose iron pipes there. I threw open the back window and greeted Charlie: “Hi Charlie, what’s up.” He barely glanced at me and pulled his tire back out into the street. After that I kinda considered him a friend.
Later that year there was a huge snowstorm. 26 inches of snow had the doors of the house blocked. I had to climb out the back window, make it into the garage, get a shovel, dig out the side door, dig out the front door, and then go out and play in crystal wonderland. I got in a wild snowball fight with Peter and Alan, and somehow I threw a snowball at someone else walking by, and that was big bad Charlie the Killer, at least 4 inches taller and 30 pounds bigger than me. My wild snowball didn’t really hit him, but he was offended.
He came at me barehanded in slow motion trudging through the snow, and I was smiling and explaining that we were just playing, and that I was his friend. I avoided his first punch by falling sideways in the snow. Peter and Alan were shy of Charlie and held back. I stumbled backwards through the soft crystal medium as Charlie lunged forward and socked me on the arm. Then stopped. He turned and trudged away. See I told you he was my friend.
What happened to Charlie the Killer? I’m almost certain he went to Viet Nam, killed many people, and died there.
LIVENING UP DEAD QUIET
Reynolds Channel in the summer was mostly calm water, with a deep channel, as much as sixty feet deep, with a sandy bottom where there lived mainly huge inedible rock crabs. On the bottom nearer the shores, the same brown color as the bottom, with two big blue eyes searching the waters was a flatfish called a fluke. It looked much like its cousin the flounder, but with a different mouth and eyes. Fluke have a much larger mouth, with rows of small fine teeth, and they have blue grey eyes. In spring and fall there were flounders in the waters and in the summer there were enough two to five pound fluke of so that you might see up to 50 little boats drifting or anchored on the calm waters of various parts of the channel.
It was quiet fishing where people dropped their fishing lines overboard with a lead sinker and two good sized baited hooks, feeling them go down to the bottom. The bottom feeding fluke were happy with several kinds of bait, especially “killies”. Killies were live little fish two to three inches long that you bought in a little wet wood box to keep alive with water as you fished. To put a killie on the sharp fish hook, people take it in their fingers quivering and shaking with life and pull the hook through its body, watching its eyes bulge. Most often the killie shows signs of life after being hooked up. The fluke liked shrimp and clams and squid too, but the word was that live killies were the best bait for fluke, and so people used them, with a little touch of death.
One day my father and two of my uncles decided to rent a little outdoor motor boat, with me the family fishing expert to lead them out on the waters of the Channel, for some relaxing quiet fluke fishing, not using killies. I preferred long strips of opalescent fresh dead squid. It was tough and leathery and held the hook well. I was in control of the outboard motor and had us head out under the Atlantic Beach Bridge, out to where the Channel meets the ocean, exciting waters to my mind. There was no wind. It was hot July, and very pleasant out on the water. There were no radios or iphones aboard (1957).
My father and uncles were peaceful and quiet and ready to fish. I rigged everyone up with fluke hooks and strips of squid. I threw the head and insides of the squid into the water to attract fish. The water was hardly moving. We were drifting slowly back into the channel. You could hear an occasional gull cry. There were a couple of other little boats drifting nearby. There was no sign of action. Time passed. The quiet was easy and we were patient. And then bingo, I hooked a fish. Our boat livened up as I announced, “I’ve got one,” and the boats in the area were watching us in a flash. I reeled in a good sized young fluke, about two pounds, held him in my hands firmly, took the hook out of his jaw carefully. I looked him in his blue grey eyes and dropped him onto the bottom of the boat. My father and uncles were psyched. The fishing had begun!
But after a half an hour there was no more action. We were drifting slowly.
I said, “Let’s move,” and we reeled in our lines. I started the motor and guided us toward an area inside the channel where I’d been successful before. There were about 20 little boats in that area, but not because there were fish there then. We all thought it could be a good there with a shift in the water. By then the July sun was a great blaze upon us and the exceptional quiet prevailed. No one had radios, and it seemed that everyone was silent. If someone cleared their throat you could hear it 100 feet away.
Suddenly I got a great idea. As unnoticeably as possible I picked up the fluke I had caught an hour ago and hooked it back onto my line. Noticed only by one of my uncles, I slyly slid my fish over the side of the boat and back down to the bottom, him dead with his mouth open and me smiling from ear to ear. When he hit bottom I let him stay there several long seconds, enjoying the moment, and then I shouted out, shattering the silence, “I’ve got one!!” The scene transformed in a flash. My father and one uncles lit up. “He’s a fighter!” I added, pulling on my line to simulate life. Every single boat within a half mile came to life. I reeled my guy in and brought him up to reemerge from the Channel, secretly dead but wet and gleaming with sunlight. Everyone got excited and rechecked their bait and recast their lines. And only me and Uncle Lee knew what I’d done. In the next half hour there was not a sign of a fish, and soon all of the boats went home, me with the one fish and a big smile.
About a week later a nice guy we knew across the street, Gerry, asked me if I’d take him and his 7 year old son out fluke fishing if he rented a little boat.
I said sure. I took us out to where the Channel meets the ocean, and again the waters were quiet and peaceful. The little boy was snuggled excitedly next to his father. I baited their line with squid and I baited and cast my line.
We were thinking about catching nice fluke, but again the waters were very quiet, again under the July sun, again with no signs of fish. We were lulled by the pleasantness and we drifted. Suddenly there was a pull on my line. “I’ve hooked one,” I said with restraint, reeling it in. It felt like another fluke about two pounds. Gerry and his son looked down into the blue water with me intently as I brought up my catch. It didn’t feel different than a fluke, but when I brought it up out of the water it was astonishingly different.
To the horror of Gerry & son and to my surprise it was a small hammerhead shark, with a remarkably large head shaped like a double-headed hammer, with an eye at both sides, looking in all directions, and a huge mouth of big sharp teeth on the little guy. Gerry let out a scream and in a flash his son screamed with him. Sharks are easy to handle because they’re not slippery. They have sandpaper-like skin. I had seen pictures of hammerheads in books. They were a rarer kind of shark that did grow up to a thousand pounds. I was fascinated, unhooked him and tried moving him around so I could get a good look into his strange eyes, but a very anxious Gerry demanded that I get it out of the boat immediately. I let the baby creature go free back into the water so that he might slowly grow into a giant and live down below, far from the field of human anxiety on the surface of the planet.
Many years later I fished Reynolds Channel one last time. I was in my forties and was married and immersed in Buddhist studies and practice.
My parents had another little beach house not far from where we spent summers when I was young. They were away and left the house for Nancy and me to use for a couple of days. I got a bright idea. “Let’s go fishing in the channel and catch lots of fish to feed our fellow Buddhists up at the retreat center.” Nancy had never fished but thought it sounded like a practical idea, and so we rented a little motor boat and headed out into the Channel to fish.
This time the waters were alive with fluke and there were many boats in the action. I tried a drift not far from other boats and caught a good-sized fish. In a few minutes I caught another fish. Nancy seemed in the flow of it and I felt ok, more alive than when I was younger. I motored us over to a spot I used to have success at, across from the Fire Station. I checked Nancy’s line, with squid hooked on for bait, put it into the water for her, felt the sinker hit the bottom, handed her the rod to hold onto, and rebaited my line.
Again it was peaceful and quiet on the Channel, with two fluke becoming lifeless in the bottom of the boat. I tried to be insensitive. But then suddenly Nancy screamed at the top of her lungs, a blood-pumping high scream, and I saw that her rod was bent down to the water jerking wildly with life it had hooked into. I took the rod from her and reeled in her fish, which I sent gasping to join the others dying in the bottom of the boat. Nancy was finished fishing but still kind of supported me in my effort to feed many people. I caught 2 more fluke and then couldn’t stand another minute of the killing. We went home. I “cleaned” the fish, cutting off the blue eyed heads and throwing them and the guts in the garbage. I washed up extra good, but it was no help. That night in my sleep for hours it seemed I had become a fluke, undulating along across the floors of ancient seas, my mouth open, trying to catch something to eat. The next day I gave the five cleaned fish to my sister. I never fished again.
YOUNG ARTIST AT WORK
When I was a wee boy I liked to draw cartoon characters. I did a very good Mickey Mouse. And then I kept drawing. A friend of my father’s thought that I might be talented and wanted to encourage me. He made me a drawing board to work on and gave me different kinds of paper and pens. By the time I was about 9 I was specializing in drawing fish, of course. Over the years my mother would go into my room from time to time to see what kinds of fish were on my drawing board. I won a prize in my art class in elementary school for a carving of a swordfish out of a big bar of soap, soap hard enough for me to make a fish image with an almost-sharp sword.
And then it happened that during my first year in high school one day my mother looked on my drawing board and was, in her words, “shocked” to see two drawings of naked babes, showing tits and ass. My mother was rather closed to sex most of her life, but after that day I overheard her talking to her girlfriends, several times, happily telling the story of the great change on my drawing board, and that was the most risqué Mom ever got.
[photo]
Sister Pat and me in Atlantic Beach just before I entered high school at age 13.
EDUCATION CAN BE FUN
High school was like liberation. You were on your own. You could talk to friends in the halls, and the classes were lively. The teachers were way younger than in elementary school. I took to wearing big loud neckties just for fun and I fell all-out in love with my math teacher. She was about 25 and was really beautiful. Miss Hoffman. My elementary school teachers had been mostly mean and old and Miss Hoffman was soo nice. In the second week, when she was teaching something, I raised my hand high.
She said, “Yes, Mr. Newman?” I stood up and declared, “I love you!” Everyone laughed. In my need to have fun I forgot that I was still living in an atomic bomb target and felt good about life.
When it came time for the Christmas holiday break I decided that the class should get Miss Hoffman a comic Christmas gift. In a dry goods store I found a very large pair of pink rubber old lady’s underpants. On them in blue ball point ink I drew a kind of back door to the undies, buttoned down with 2 blue ink buttons. Inside the back door I wrote, Merry Christmas Miss Hoffman”, and everyone in the class signed their names. Miss Hoffman laughed hard at the unique gift.
She was friends with my English teacher, Mr. Neumann, who I didn’t like. She played tennis with him. Once in class he read aloud some lines from a poem:
Dark as the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I am the captain of my fate.
I am the conqueror of my soul.
He asked us what it meant. I raised my hand and said, “It means bad as it gets from birth to death he still says he’s in charge.” “Wrong”, said Mr. Neumann. “Anyone else?” No one spoke. Then he said, “It means hard as it gets from birth to death, I’m still in command.”
After about 2 seconds the whole class burst out laughing. “What’s the matter?” asked Mr. N. “That’s what Robert said,” someone answered, “And you told him he was wrong!” Everyone howled except him. He was mad. After class he made some stupid remark to me and I decided to hit him, but my buddy Angie, who was a weight lifter, pushed me out of the room before it got hot.
DRAMA WITH MY SCIENCE TEACHER
Also in my freshman year I had an old chaotic chemistry teacher, Mr. Levy. I soon noticed that he could be led off track. In the 3rd class I wrote a note and everyone passed it around the room. It read, “When I stand up and say, ‘Footprints on the ceiling’, everyone stand up and look and point to the ceiling.” When the last person in the class had read my note I raised my hand high. Mr. Levy had just been talking about sulfur.
“Yes, Mr. Newman?” he asked. I stood up and declared, “Sulfur, there’s a lot of it in the western United States, where there used to be Indians, but they’ve been displaced. Many of them have come east. Look, footprints on the ceiling!” 7 or 8 of my classmates stood and pointed to the ceiling with me as we all smiled. Mr. Levy, who was a nervous old man, said it was very amusing, asked us to sit down, and continued to talk sulfur.
The chem class was in a room with a marble-topped teaching table over which Mr. Levy made experiments and taught us. One day he was heating hydrochloric acid in a test tube over a Bunsen burner flame, to release hydrogen, and the whole class got nervous.
We knew that the hydrogen was flammable and he had the test tube too near the flame as he talked. Then some one who was in the girl’s room came in through the door causing a draft from an open window which blew the flame into the hydrogen, and, WHAM, a nasty little explosion sent acid and glass everywhere, though amazingly no one got hurt bad. Everyone left the room disgusted with Mr. Levy to get into the bathrooms to wash off. Somehow he was okay but got some on his glasses. He was apologizing repeatedly. But we were to have our revenge.
The last day of class, just before the New York State regent’s exam for chemistry, we arrived to find that instead of a last day celebration Mr. Levy was giving us an unannounced 20 minute test. We had to take out paper and write out answers to questions handed out to us. I was really irritated.
After about 20 minutes he told us to stop writing, and he went on to prepare us for the regent’s exam. It became clear that he didn’t want our test papers. It was a study exam. I had a bright idea.
I started gathering the test papers from people around me and tearing them up fast into little pieces. The guy next to me joined in. We were building up two piles of paper pieces quickly as Mr. Levy went on, oblivious to what we might be doing. We got all the test pages shredded just before the bell rang ending the class.
A girl near the door who was working with us opened the classroom door just as another girl opened the window, to let loose the famous draft that caused the explosion, and we tossed the piles of paper pieces up into the classroom air where they hung suspended, filling the air and swirling up with the draft. It was a thing of beauty. I left the room hearing Mr. Levy’s voice loud and clear, “Wait till I get that Newman”. P.S. He didn’t get me, and I got one of four 100s in the New York State regent exam in chemistry.
Lucky me. I was going to be a doctor.
AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Some time in my freshman year of high school I went to Washington D.C. with my mother, father, and sister. My father had a little office equipment business in Manhattan, and had somehow managed to sell some office equipment to the White House. He got friendly with the White House office manager, who invited dad to visit some time.
Soon dad had made an appointment to visit, and we drove to Washington with my mother and sister. After we checked into a hotel, Dad took me with him and drove to the White House. Somehow at that time it wasn’t that hard to drive into the White House compound and park in a lot marked visitors, near the office entrance, at the back of the building. Dad spoke into an intercom and we were buzzed in. The office manager, Mr. Hansen, greeted us and walked us though the office, into a hallway. He was really nice and wanted to show us just a bit of the White House proper.
Down the hallway he opened a door and we looked in. There was a big wood table, shiny and dark, with 10 leather chairs around it, each with a bronze emblem, saying: President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, etc. Without hesitation I pressed though my father and Mr. Hansen and walked into the room, going directly to the President’s chair at the head of the table. I sat down, eased back, and looked around. Since my father and Mr. Hansen were amused, I had a moment. I wondered something like, “If this is the most powerful chair in the world, what are all the forces at play here?” They waited for me to rise and exit on my own. I only took a few seconds but I did take my time. When I started to get up out of the President’s chair I noticed an ashtray on the great table in front of me. In it were several books of matches with the words “Swiped from Harry Truman.” I smiled and took one. He got me.
On our way out of Washington I noticed we were passing a large stately stone building with the words Atomic Energy Commission boldly on it. I insisted that my father stop the car, and I ran up the long flight of white marble steps to the entrance to the building. Two fully armed marines stopped me and asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted brochures and any information I could get on the atomic bomb for a science project in high school. They turned me away.
RUNNING FOR OFFICE
As high school progressed I remained wild but stayed out of trouble, until my senior year when I ran for Vice President, the second highest elected office. There were three parties, each with four candidates: President, Vice President, Secretary, and Treasurer. My party was the X party. The big event we were heading toward was a series of four presentations on the stage of the auditorium, one each for the senior, junior, sophomore, and freshman assemblies, giving them our ideas about running the school. I had to write a speech and deliver it.
The night before the election assemblies I was stuck. I had given the job of writing my speech to a smart friend, George, but I was unsatisfied with his clever remarks. Then I decided, what the hell, I’ll be wild.
Before the first assembly we had to show our speeches to the faculty election advisor. I showed him the clever speech George wrote for me. No problem. The first assembly was the seniors, my class. One of the two guys I was running against, Biff, was on the football team, which was mostly seniors. For some reason I really wanted to get them.
When it came my turn to make my speech I said into the microphone, “If I am elected Vice President I promise you a real burlesque show, right on this stage. Ah yes, I can see it all now. The barker is calling, “Here on my left ladies and gentlemen are 8 lovely exciting Egyptian belly dancers. They walk, they talk, and they crawl on their bellies like reptiles, shaking each muscle individually and collectively.’ I never got another word out. Pandemonium broke loose. Laughter rocked the audience. The quarterback of the football team almost fell out of the balcony howling.
The faculty advisor was avidly trying to get my attention. I smiled and said into the microphone, “We don’t have time to discuss it all now, so just stop me anytime to talk.” Then I introduced the Secretary candidate from my party, Margie Tucker.
I got yelled at hard for being wild. I was threatened with expulsion if I used the microphone for outrageous behavior again. I didn’t, but I also had little to say in the next three assemblies and lost the election by a slim margin to Biff the footballer. It was all worth it because I got the quarterback in the senior assembly. The main thing was that I was searching for ways to come alive in the atomic age.
Three things shook me in my senior year. A friend of the family, a 31 year old father of two, died of pneumonia. So young. I was shocked. That was depressing. Then my friend Jason’s older brother had a heart attack at the age of 29, which did serious damage. That disturbed me. But what really tore the ground out from under me was when my beautiful cousin, 23 years old, with two children, got leukemia, and went down months after being diagnosed. We were mortal and it felt depressingly hard.
POETS IN DANGEROUS TIMES
My friend Peter and I were close from when we were 5 years old on through high school and far beyond. Very close. He eventually became a major songwriter for the Grateful Dead, using the name Peter Monk. For years he flew on jet planes with the Dead when they gave concerts. Because he gave himself the last name Monk some, through their drug haze, saw him as “spiritual advisor for the Dead”.
Unlike my parents, who had American high school education only, Peter’s parents had been born and college-educated in Vienna. They taught Peter and his brother Bobby and me about literature and music. Before we went to high school we had been introduced to major poets and musicians of the past. Peter and I were both anxious about the present world. We both saw the potential for unprecedented darkness. Both of us wanted to be great poets and have an impact on the world, as directly as possible.
Also in high school with us was John Giorno, who was to become a renowned poet and a very close friend of mine in the years to come, after
college. John and I would both be in the forefront of avant-garde poetry, and we both would become direct students of Dudjom Rinpoche, a grand master of Tibetan Buddhism.
After high school Peter went to the University of Michigan, where he was admired and had his way with the English department. I entered a premed program at a small college in upstate New York, Hobart College.
In my English class the first day the teacher asked us to write about any event in our lives, at least a page or two, as a homework assignment. I couldn’t wait to get back to my dorm room to write about what happened to me as a twelve year old when I went to sleep and woke up instead.
I worked and worked for hours trying to express it. Finally I had a paragraph of about 6 sentences called Knowledge of Death. The teacher looked at it in front of the class and was confused. He looked for another page. “Is this all of it?” he asked me. “That’s it,” I said. He said maybe I should try again. It would take me many more years to know what had happened to me as a boy. It was to take almost 20 years of work with Tibetan meditation masters to understand.
After a year and a half as an honors student in the premed program at Hobart College, I hit the wall. I had to leave Hobart. I returned to the family house in Brooklyn. For lack of guidance, yet wanting to continue with college, I entered a chemical engineering program at a respected engineering school, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and I was lost.
Sleeping in the same bed I was in as a twelve year old when I had some experience of the absolute world, I suffered through my engineering studies and began to write poetry. “The live fish lay gasping on the wharf, not knowing.”
Peter would come home from Michigan for vacation, and we got closer. We were both writing and he had just published his first poems in the University of Michigan literary magazine. At that time the general darkness of life, the continued threat of nuclear or biological weapon disasters, was hard for us both. We both thought that an advance of the use of language could help evolution.
THE START OF THE LONG WAY INTO SEX
I was about 7 and I was playing with my friend Jane in her back-yard. She was about the same age as me. She asked me, “Do you want to see my thing?” “Sure,” I said. She stepped closer to me, lifted her dress, and pulled down her panties. I looked carefully at the crack between her legs and said to her, “You can’t really see much.” She tried to open the hole a little. There was pink flesh inside, but you still couldn’t see much.
“Let me see the other hole,” I said. Jane turned around, with her dress hiked and her panties down, and bent over. Her asshole was dark and you couldn’t see anything at all.
Just then Jane’s mother caught us and threw open the kitchen window with a shout. I ran away and returned to my house. I had just learned something important. If you made friends with a girl you could get to see her stuff.
It wasn’t until 12 years later that I finally poked into the pink female thing. It was a black hooker in Harlem and I did ask her to open it wide as possible first so I could have a good look. She did and I decided to leave. She shouted. I dropped my pants, and with no joy I proceeded to initiate myself in the front hole of a black woman.
My sexual life after that got easier, but that’s all I’m going to say. I won’t kiss and tell about any of my necessary sexual relations. But when I close my eyes and see into the dark I can feel them all. It’s helped me feel naked all my life.
SLOW HAND AND MOM & MARIE
As I grew up I tried to figure out who my parents were. My father’s father,
Adolph, seemed very German to me, and growing up in WWII that bothered me, but so did my father’s moustache, which he wore characteristically all his life, exactly like Hitler’s moustache. My father wore it innocently. His father did not sport a moustache. Adolph dressed fastidiously clean, held himself up tall and tight-lipped. In control. Cold to his kin as I recall. Fortunately his wife, Hannah, was lively and had a big laugh, and it’s good that my father was more like Hannah.
I’d say that Jack Newman was a normal guy sexually. He was a good dancer and was something of a live wire. But that was Brooklyn in the early 1900s. It wasn’t time for the sexual revolution and Jack had to be happy with what he got. I guess he got a few. In his late 20’s he became good friends with my mother’s handsome brothers, and there it was that he met Estelle.
My mother loved her brothers and Jack came to her from the inside. It happened that one night Jack came over to see the guys but they were out. Jack asked Stell to go to the movies with him. My fate was sealed. And so it was that the demure virgin Stell wed, and I became inevitable. But as Stell’s mother told her, sex was not for pleasure. Women allowed it to satisfy their husbands and to have children. My mother accepted that and made it her oath.
My father good-naturedly kept Trojan condoms near the bed, but he had a lot of obstacles, not the least of which were my mother’s extremely heavy periods and her bad back. But he loved her, even if he wasn’t really loved,
and through the years they had enough time for my mother to open up sexually. From what she told my sister later on, it sounds like she never did. BUT, Stell did have one very special friend, who she dated through the years, and that was Marie. They were friends from high school where they both played on the James Madison High School women’s basketball team. And they stayed close after that all their lives. Mom would tell Pat that Marie was her best friend.
By the time I was playing basketball and attending James Madison, Mom and Marie would occasionally date. Marie was an unusual woman usually with short hair. She was good looking like Estelle and it was hot to see how they dressed up for each-other. My father accepted that Stell had an old close relationship with Marie. I believe that the ladies went away for a weekend a couple of times over the years, once to Brokeback Mountain – only kidding. I believe that Mom and Marie were not lovers but I believe Mom was closer to Marie than she was with Jack and Pat and me
Late in life Pat asked Dad to record his famous recital of The Kid’s Last Fight, a story told in rhyme about two boxers who were close friends:
“Us two was pals, the Kid and me.
He tipped the scales at t’irty t’ree….”
Dad made two copies, for Pat and for me, for posterity. Remarkably he signed the recordings, “Slow Hand”. We didn’t put that on your gravestone, Dad. Nor did we say anything about Marie at Mom’s funeral when she was 94.
GO WEST YOUNG MAN
After high school, after a year and a half of pre-med studies at Hobart College, and after a year and a half trapped at Brooklyn Poly, I broke out. I was ready to leave college and go live with my uncle Henry in Paris, where I’d write – a real possibility, supported by Henry, but an older student in two of my classes, Barry, encouraged me to think about finishing college in California. He particularly asked me to think about going to the University of California at Berkeley, a great university, across the Bay from San Francisco, a city of culture. I did apply to Cal Berkeley, with transcripts showing me go from Dean’s list to probation; I was doubtful that I’d be accepted. Then just when I was ready to get my ticket to go to Paris I was accepted to Cal Berkeley, land of Nobel Prize nuclear science and quantum physics, with as many distinguished departments as Harvard. I had a fresh start on my education as a guy who still felt the world had no future.
I worked for the California Highway System in Santa Rosa over the summer. At night and on weekends I kept to myself and read many of the great novels, including War and Peace; Anna Karina; Magic Mountain; Ulysses; The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment; and American poetry, mostly Whitman and T.S. Eliot. I also put a pillow over my face to try to induce paranormal experience and I succeeded.
Then I went down to Berkeley and got an apartment with two roommates. For some reason I decided to walk into the locker room of the University of California football team, the California Bears. The only person I found in the big locker room was Pappy Waldorf, the famous coach of the team. He had won several Rose Bowls. I knew who he was. I went right up to him and said I was interested in playing. He was huge, must have been six foot four and well over 300 pounds. I was six feet tall and weighed maybe 180.
I told him I played wide receiver on the Hobart College freshman football team. I was amazed to learn that he knew the Hobart coach and respected the Hobart teams, which really were impressive. Coach Waldorf slapped me on the butt, got me fit out with a uniform, and directed me out onto the playing field where the Bears were aggressively scrimmaging. What the hell was I doing?
I only lasted two scrimmages. On the first one I was lucky and did ok. On my second try I took a violent block across the ankles from a small black all-American halfback. I hit the earth hard face down, paused, got up and went back behind the scrimmage to take a breather, and then I inconspicuously went back into the locker room and quit, unnoticed.
But because I told my roommates I had walked-on into the football team that day and was accepted onto the team by Papi Waldorf, somehow the image of me as a tough and ballsy guy got projected, and served me in my social life. It was 1957. I didn’t know where my life was going, there among the Nobel laureates and vast atomic science facilities that gave me the existential creeps.
PRESIDENTIAL PANDEMONIUM
I had a quiet, intense friend who had been number one in the class of incoming physics students, Russell, a transfer student like me. He came from a tragic family in Sacramento. His father had been a jazz musician who committed suicide; one of his brothers had been institutionalized for years after trying to kill his mother with a big knife, and his other brother, with a wife and three children, was suicidal. Russell was amazed at my audaciousness, yet he pleaded with me to join a fraternity that he had to join because of some family obligation. I grudgingly said okay and for two months I was to enjoy some of the most hilarious escapades of my life, as part of my education.
A big fraternity house just off the UC campus became my temporary home. I was in with a varied group of pledges, mostly freshman. Since I was a football player from New York I was given certain extra attention by the fraternity brothers. Soon they would see that I was a born gang leader.
It was the time of a big national election. Adlai Stevenson was running for President. I forget the republican. The frat brothers were highly republican.
Me and one other pledge, Willy, were secretly liberal democrats. Adlai Stevenson came to Oakland for a political rally. Willy and I quietly attended.
Behind Adlai on the stage was a huge blow-up photo of him, maybe 10 feet high and 8 feet wide. After the rally was over Willy and I hung out near the stage. We blended in with people helping clean up. The giant photo was taken down and rolled up. Willy and I helped with that. And then we told the other guy that we’d take care of the big photo. It was my idea but I couldn’t have done it without Willy.
We quietly walked the magical heist away and into Willy’s car. We waited until it was midnight to sneak the great democrat image into the sanctuary of young republicans. I found a good place to hide it up in the library, on the third floor. We went to sleep early that Saturday morning. About 8 o’clock I got some coffee and headed up to the library, which was empty. I quietly locked the door and barricaded it.
Then I opened the big library window, overseeing the front yard and nearby republican frat houses. I hung the huge Adlai Stevenson photo down the side of the building, where it fit perfectly, well out of reach of the shouting brothers below on the lawn. It clearly looked like my fraternity had dramatically decided to go democrat! I was able to hold my position for a good 20 minutes, having locked and blocked the door well. The bedlam at the door as the frat brothers tried to break though coupled with the craze of the disturbed bros on the lawn beneath the great photo was a thing of beauty.
Finally they broke through the door and pushed through my barricade with an all-out assault. The first person through to get me was Artie, my pledge brother, strongest guy in the fraternity, and he was chuckling. I was howling. The brothers yelled at me and said that I’d be given 92 smacks with the ass-beating paddle that they punished pledges with. I went to my room and put on all my 10 pair of underpants to receive my punishment with a smile.
SMELLY REVENGE
My smile by then was getting to the frat brothers. The next thing I was to do to the frat bros was forceful, but was done as teamwork with five of my pledge brothers in which I was the gang leader.
Shortly after the political embarrassment, the brothers ordered all 17 pledges into the library while they intentionally protracted a serious meeting downstairs. It was obvious punishment.
After 20 minutes or so I said I’m not going to take this shit, I’m going, and I quietly went out the library window down the side of the building to the ground, followed by Willy, Russell, Artie, and Larry. We drove to Oakland Chinatown because I said we needed some old smelly fish.
We found an open Chinese fish market. I went right up to the big owner in his fishy white apron and asked for small smelly fish. He got pissed off and defensive. “My fish no smell! My fish flesh!”
I looked around and saw a bin of little smelt fish. This is what we need, I said with joy. The fish man grumbled in Chinese and sold us three pounds of smelts, 31 fish, wrapped in Chinese newspaper, which I hoped would imprint some incomprehensible message on the fish for the brothers.
Artie crushed the smelts up with his powerful hands to help the fish smell strong and to mash in the Chinese words. [This is absolutely true.]
We sped back to the frat house and climbed back up into the library armed with the smelts. The brothers were still in their long somber meeting, and the library door was unlocked. “Quick,” I said. “Here; everyone grab a few fish and, fast as possible, throw a fish in the back of every frat brother’s clothing closet. Hide them quickly and get back here. Go.”
I sat in mirth as six of the pledges sped quietly out into the big house and then were back in the library in a few minutes. Every clothes closet had been hit except our pledge porch. We congratulated our guys and made them scrub their hands, as the brothers continued to meet, trying to punish us for being a bad pledge group. – Afterwards, interestingly, they never mentioned the fish to us - how’s that for amazing pride - but they had become angry, with the fish smell lingering in their clothes.
The next day we 17 pledge brothers were supposed to sneak away together on the traditional pledge sneak. The brothers weren’t supposed to know where we were going (Russell’s family cottage about 30 miles away.) There were rules by which to judge if the pledge sneak was successful, like if the brothers kidnapped and hid one of the pledges in the sneak process we lost points. I called a pledge meeting at a Berkeley bar to plan our escape.
Not only did we want to escape cleanly to our retreat, we needed to hit the frat house hard on the way out of town. Russell, Artie, and I drove to a chicken factory not too far away. Wow what a smell. Worse than fish stink.
We bought two large burlap sacks of unclean chicken feathers, a huge amount which could go a long way even in a big house, more than 50 pounds of vile feathers. We locked the stink sacks in the trunk of the car, went back to the house, and went to sleep. The next morning would be the pledge sneak escape.
We got up to find that one of our pledge guys was missing and all the frat brothers seemed gone. We enjoyed casting the smelly feathers everywhere in the house, especially in the closets, in a riot of action.
Then as we quickly packed for the getaway I heard a noise in a room just above the pledge sleeping porch. We heard the voice of the missing pledge asking to be released.
I went right out our widow and climbed over the pledge porch and opened the window of the room where little George was being held captive by two frat bros. I jumped at the two of them and got them both by the head, one under each arm, and gave them to Artie, who came through the window close behind me. We tied them up, freed little George, and left for the country.
There were some near-death and some aggravating episodes throughout and after the pledge sneak, so Russell and I moved out of the frat house into a huge room in a big old house diagonally across the street. Russell had a 357 magnum pistol and a BB rifle. The pistol was to cause some drama for us in the years to come. He used the BB gun a lot. He used to set me off howling when he’d shoot at the frat brothers across the street and cause upset. He kept it up for weeks and didn’t get caught.
Russ said I inspired his wildness. I’d say my wildness came from trying to break free.
THE NEAR DEATH OF THE FATHER OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
At that time Russ had a job on a late night shift at the huge atomic power research center up the hillside in Berkeley, the domain of Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb”.
Early one morning, about 3:10am, Russell entered a long narrow passageway somewhere in the engineering design between the massive cyclotron and the Bevatron particle accelerator buildings. As he started down the passageway he saw another person coming toward him, Robert Openheimer. They would have to pass very closely.
Russell’s paranoia broke loose. He thought he might have to kill Oppenheimer, who had picked up Russell’s vibes almost immediately but managed to not lose his mind as he approached the coming crisscross in the passageway.
By the time they actually passed each other Oppenheimer was nearly dead of heart failure, but he held on and escaped. Russell was understandably crazed by the incident. But he got by. Later Russell was to become an architect and then a first rate film maker. He worked for CBS News in Europe for a decade, and came back to America completely disturbed.
WHY PAT DIDN’T WANT TO BE MISS BROOKLYN
Mom was good looking and my sister was very pretty. My father was funny-looking, like a comic, and he was proud of his good-looking family. Without asking Pat’s permission, when she was 17, he sent a photo of her into the Miss Brooklyn contest for the Miss America competition. Pat was selected as one of the four finalists. She was a shy girl and was angry at Dad and Mom for getting her involved without asking her. But her good friend Marilyn was also one of the final four, so Pat did it. They drove around Brooklyn in September in an open Cadillac convertible, each of the girls wearing a one piece bathing suit. They waved to the many people they made smile along the way, but Pat didn’t enjoy it. She felt humiliated.
Pat still hasn’t forgiven Dad for that. Even though in the final-four photo clearly Pat and Marilyn were the outstanding beauties of the group, one of the other girls was selected. Pat doesn’t like that photo. It was not right that she wasn’t asked if she wanted to be Miss Brooklyn. It’s remarkable how long painful emotions can last.
But I’ll tell you a story Pat does like. I was 18 and she was 14 and my parents let me take her out on a double date with my friend Mike. He had a nice car. Mike decided that it would be fun if we went to see a burlesque show, and we all agreed. That was 1953 and comic burlesque with tit and ass was fun and probably still is. It was hard to believe how big some of the dancers’ breasts were. I liked the comic skits. It was dark enough in the audience and Pat was tall enough so that the waitress didn’t card her. She asked Pat what she wanted to drink. Pat had never even had a beer. She glanced around quickly and saw a sign for Four Roses. “I’ll have a Four Roses,” said Pat. “How do you want that?” asked the waitress. “In a glass!” said Pat, and we all did laugh. But Pat recalls that when we got home and she smelled a little of alcohol I got seriously yelled at. I tried to not show my smile.
THE POET TRAPPED IN THE MILITARY COMMAND
When I graduated Cal Berkeley in 1958, still wanting to be a doctor, I lived with the underlying disturbances of the thermonuclear age. I was aware of the resources given to military science and the nuclear industry. Peter had graduated from the University of Michigan and was an officer in the US Navy. Most of my other friends were being drafted and were getting 2 year
tours of duty in the infantry in Germany. Like Peter I had officer training in college. I decided to cut a deal with the army. I’d be placed on a guided missile base just north of New York City and I could go home for three weekends a month, plus I would play on both the baseball and basketball teams. The downside was that it was 3 years of military service instead of 2, but I took the deal. My first day in the Army was memorable.
In Manhattan I joined a group of 11 guys going to Fort Dix, New Jersey. A sergeant asked, strongly, “Does anyone here have ROTC training?” I did, two years in college. I was put in charge of the men. That pattern would persist in my brief military career, and it served me well the first day.
In Fort Dix we were shouted at and quickly given large amounts of gear to stuff into a big duffle bag. Then our hair was cut off and we were injected with various substances and ordered back to the barracks.
Left to myself for a moment I felt free. In my duffle bag was a nice officer-looking uniform, with the same hat the officers wore. While the other guys were just trying to calm down I dressed up nicely in the officer-like uniform and went out into big bad Fort Dix.
As soon as I got outside the building three officers came by and saluted me. I had an over-casual response but got away with it. I found that a movie was playing and I watched it, Anastasia, with Yul Brenner and Ingrid Bergman. It was excellent. When I got back to the barracks the guys said to me, “Where were you?” I said, “I tried on some clothes and went to a movie.” They said that two sergeants had come in just after I left and hazed them bad. They were made to crawl around the building searching for cigarette buts and were generally abused, so that they would respect being commanded, I guess.
The next day we were stuffed into a bus with our duffle bags. I was the last one on-board, just able to push myself inside the door so it could close. When we reached the site of the 4 barrack complex that would be our training unit home base, the bus driver opened the door and I stepped down.
The driver said he didn’t know where our reception committee was. He told me to go knock on the barracks door across the way. I did. There was some sound. I opened the door. Four army guys were smoking drinking whisky and playing cards. “What!!?” someone shouted at me. I said, “The driver said to tell you the recruits are here.” They leaped up energetically, grabbed their helmets shouting, and as I stepped back they burst through the door, passing me with simulated anger to get the new recruits out of the bus.
They attacked the bus doors and began to grab and throw the new guys out of the bus, one by one, shouting loudly at them, throwing their steel helmets hard into the feet of the new guys to make them line up. I quietly stepped into the back of the line.
We were marched into a hall and commanded to stand at attention. We were talked at with contempt. There was a silence. Then one of the sergeants called out toughly, “Newman!” I answered, “Yes?” He called back to me, “Yes what?!” I said, “Yes sergeant.” “Okay,” he said. “You will be the noncommissioned officer in charge of your unit.” I was lucky there was no war going on, just the underlying stress of living in dangerous times.
I was given my own room in the barrack that I was in charge of. I had an assortment of young men ranging from two antagonistic giants, Polish Ben, and Italian Mario, and a gentle violinist from the St. Louis symphony orchestra, Steven.
I was good at moving the men in file by counting cadence, like, “Hit ‘em again with your left, your right. Hit ‘em again with your left, your right. Cadence count, one, two, three, four. One two. Three four. Had a girl on a hill. Cadence count I got a thrill. One, two, three, four. One two. Three four.” I was good at it and the men liked it, and I liked not having to walk in step with them, moving along at the side of the group, enjoying Fort Dix.
The second week I had to try to break up a huge fight between big Ben and bad Mario. So I tried out my tough commander face and shouted them to a stop long enough to get it diffused. I got to be their friend, a man among men, but I also liked having Steven play passionate versions of Bach sonatas in my room at rest time. I put up a poem on the barrack bulletin board about hand grenades and soul food. I don’t know how it happened, but when my group crawled through the obstacle course under machine gun fire I was back in the orderly room typing a new poem. The truth was I could have led my men in battle if I had to. But living in the nuclear age I didn’t want to.
The culmination of basic training was the seventh week, when I got to take my guys out into simulated battle conditions, with bullets and grenades. Tracer bullets lit the air and sergeants screamed at us in the dark. I asked one if he was crazy and he went wild. We kept going.
In one field we were taught fire power. A black sergeant commanded us. He said you fire and you fire and you fire your weapon and you keep the enemy down. I asked him loud and clear if he meant Russians and Chinese, because if he did there were more of them than us and they have more firepower. He got furious. He said, “We can kill ten to one of those faggots. You want to try to attack me?” “Why would I try to do that,” I said. “I’d just shoot you from here.” I thought he’d have a seizure, but we got through the night. I was on the edge, as ever, looking for a way out.
NUCLEAR MISSILES AND THE TURNING POINT
After basic training I was sent to a guided missile base in Connecticut, my assignment for my tour of duty, not far from New York City. After 4 days there with the guided missiles I realized I couldn’t do it. I went to the chief medical officer and looked him right in the eyes. “Basic training was crazy enough,” I said. I described my 7th week encounters. I said I was healthy and clear-headed and I simply could not serve in a unit capable of incinerating millions of people.
He sent me to St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York, for psychological observation. My sister Pat drove me to the hospital. When I arrived they placed me in a locked ward where orderlies registered me, took my clothes and my bag, and gave me a patient’s gown to put on. They led me to a steel cell with a heavy door.
They gently led me into the room and then locked me in with a wham. I was suddenly deeply shocked and I panicked all out for the first time in my life. I pounded and pounded on the steel door and shouted for attention. No one responded. I quieted down. Another step to finding my way in the atomic night.
The next day I was put in an open ward and I consulted with a medical officer. He asked me about my state of mind. I told him there was nothing wrong with my mind. It’s just that there was no war on and it wasn’t good for me to participate in the nuclear military. I said it would make me sick. I saw the same psychiatrist once a week and told that story. What I came to see was that if I said nothing else I’d be processed for an honorable discharge “for convenience of service to the government”.
It worked. It took two months of processing, with weekends off with my girlfriend Jane, who lived a couple of miles from the hospital. Internally what happened was that I developed an overwhelming state of depression, almost crippling, but I had to contain it. I didn’t ask for drugs. I was afraid if I told the medic about the long periods of intense depression he might keep me in the hospital longer. The stress was extreme. My parents didn’t understand it. Jane did. She helped me get through. The depression had a powerful impact on me for many months to come, slow time in a hard world. I was discharged after three months.
My parents were confused by me. I was 22 and free of any military obligation. The world felt very dangerous, very stressful. I was depressed. I needed more time to figure out what to do. So I went to Europe for a year, on a German passenger ship, to see European art and architecture and to spend time in Paris with my uncle Henry. He knew I was serious about writing and he encouraged me.
HEALING IN EUROPE
So there I was, October, 1959, on a German ship heading across the Atlantic eastward toward Europe and the sources of Western civilization, feeling that art might heal me. I had strong feelings about the potential of art in this dark age.
I had a perfect guide to the art of Europe, Leonard, a painter who had studied the art and architecture of Europe at Cooper Union Art School in New York for 4 years, and he was totally psyched. He knew where all the best art was. He was going to see it at last.
We arrived in Paris. I stayed with Henry and my aunt Emmy, and the next day Leonard and I went to the magnificent Louvre Museum. Walking slowly through truly great galleries of famous paintings we came upon a room of Rembrandts.
I stood before Bathsheba, wife of David, mother of Solomon, kings of Israel, a painting of a life-sized naked woman, luminously white, who has just read a letter from David. Facing front completely, right at you, wide open, sitting on her bed, she was stunningly displayed in human flesh alive with light.
In a flash I experienced the importance of visual art in the world, especially in the atomic era.
A few days later we went to Chartres cathedral. The magnificent spiritual architecture gave me a multidimensional sense of the potential of spiritual architecture in our age. My journey to Europe was quickly giving me healing opportunities.
We were riding on a train out of France and into western Germany when Leonard cried out to me to grab my bag and get off the train with him fast. We had stopped at a station. He had just noticed that the train stop was Issenheim, home of the famous Gruenwald triptych, The Resurrection of Christ.
[photo]
We found the painting in a back room of a humble church. It was spectacular, a remarkable achievement of figure painting, a human form in brilliant rainbow light, a powerful body of light, arising. That opened me to the potential of spiritual art.
I got tired of traveling and decided to go to Vienna and hear opera for a while. I had never been to an opera before, but I loved Mozart. I stayed for three weeks and attended many operas. I also got a lot of loving healing from an American girl spending the winter there. Then I went back to Paris to quiet down for a few months and write. Uncle Henry was a good guide to Paris and Europe in general.
He had graduated first in his class at St. John’s Law School in New York and went to Europe as an officer in naval intelligence. He worked out of Paris as soon as it was liberated. He was in a special unit that was seeking German work on the atomic bomb. It was considered so top priority that Henry was sometimes sent into hot areas just cleared, to see if he could apprehend any German intelligence, among ruined buildings, carnage, fires, and receding explosions.
After Germany surrendered he worked in the Nuremberg war trails. Then he stayed on in Europe. He was courted by the CIA but avoided it. He was at home in Germany after the war. He met Emmy there, an American girl who had grown up and was educated well on a farm in Connecticut. Her father was a successful artist. Henry married Emmy and had a law practice in Heidelberg for years, read Hemmingway and T. S. Eliot, and then settled comfortably in Paris with Emmy. Henry was my ideal intelligence agent for the good life in postwar Europe. I decided to stay on in Paris until I healed from depression completely.
MY EXCITING DISCOVERY OF AMERICAN ART IN PARIS
Henry got me a nice room in a small hotel in the shadows of Napoleon’s tomb. I started to do breathing, just breathing, finding stillpoint in slow time, with the support of the monumental emptiness of the tomb. Reading and writing and breathing.
Into Paris came my buddy Peter, in his naval officer uniform. Henry loved and admired him at first sight, like he was a magical image of himself in that same uniform when he was young.
Peter found home with us for the weekend. We drank too much and Peter got wild and angry, took a swing at Henry, angry that the military was running the world with him stuck helping them. Peter left in a sad rage to return to the aircraft carrier Randolph in the Mediterranean Sea. [Later, in 1960, I was able to help him get out of the navy much as I got out of the army, talking to medics.]
In the spring before I left Paris on my way back to America, there was a stunningly impressive exhibition of abstract expressionist American art at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. It consisted of 18 of Jackson Pollack’s paintings, including the biggest and best of the open field works, and two each of the best paintings of De Kooning, Kline, Gorky, Motherwell, Still, Rothko, and a few others. The impact was unforgettable. When European artists went to America after the Germans occupied Paris they found the work of artists in that show and they declared that the genius of western art had shifted to America. What a great thing for a young poet to see before returning to New York to try to establish himself. My life force was healing with art. I returned to New York quietly on the Queen Elizabeth transatlantic liner, wondering what I would do.
TIM LEARY AND THE PINK POWER PILLS
Back in New York in 1959 I soon met Ann Rower, a gem of an English lit major at the University of Michigan involved with the UM literary magazine. Ann knew my life-long buddy Peter. Peter, Ann, and I got very close on Peter’s leaves from the aircraft carrier Randolph. Once it docked in New York harbor and Peter took us aboard. Afterwards he got angry and reenlisted in the Navy, but the three of us had much karma together to come.
An event of magical luminosity happened to Ann and I out on a Long Island beach at night in the summer. We parked the car on the edge of the sand and walked down to the black ocean. We took off our clothes and went in. We dove under, came up near each other, and we were amazed. We were luminescent! We were covered with billions of tiny luminous jellyfish. We swirled our luminous bodies and marveled. Then we started to hug and merge.
Suddenly a police car arrived, gliding past our car, slowly coming all the way onto the beach. We started to make our escape. We could see the limit of their flashlights. We skirted their lights, got out of the water, grabbed our clothes, got into our car, and sped off naked, still gleaming with the excellent body light.
In September 1960 Ann and I were married and moved to Boston. Ann had a fellowship to Harvard. I quickly lucked into a job one night a week as the attendant at the desk of the poetry room at the Harvard library, and I got free-lance editing work at a good publishing house, Beacon Press.
I called my friend Ben, a savvy mentor who lived in Berkeley, California. Ben said he was suffering in Berkeley but he had two friends who had just arrived at Harvard, Tim Leary and Frank Barron, and Tim had a big house in Brighton. Ben said that Tim might invite him to stay in his large house. Ben said that Tim and Frank were transpersonal psychologists from the psychology department at Cal Berkeley and they were experimenting with a powerful new drug at Harvard. Ben gave me Tim’s phone number.
I called and spoke to Tim. He did think highly of Ben. Tim said that if I got Ben an airplane ticket to fly to Boston, he could stay in Tim’s house and maybe help with the drug experimentation. I was glad I was able to help Ben fly into new horizons. Looked like interesting living theater to me.
Within two days Frank Barron drove over to the apartment where Ann and I lived on Beacon Hill in Boston, to visit a little and then to go to the airport to pick up Ben. Frank’s wife Nancy was with him, a tall beauty Frank had met when she was a show girl in Las Vegas who came from a family steeped in academic anthropology. Frank was considered the world’s foremost expert on creativity. He had interviewed T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and other prominent artists to study the creative experience.
In our apartment Frank told me about a remarkable experience he had the night before with the drug they were trying to study. He described going head on into death and through it, remaining aware. I figured it could be an enlightenment experience or a drug high or both. As we discussed Frank’s experience from the night before I was sitting in front of the live fireplace, working the flames. Something paranormal and silent happened between Frank and me and the flames. The trip was on. Frank said I was a shaman.
On the way to the airport I learned that Tim had been shocked profoundly a few months ago when his wife committed suicide, leaving him with their two children, a 13 year old girl and a boy of 11. Both Tim and Frank had one year contracts with the Harvard psychology department. Tim went ahead with life as best as he could.
On the way from Cal Berkeley to Harvard that summer, Tim, his children, Frank, and Nancy vacationed in Mexico, at a rented Villa, for a month, and there Tim and Frank ingested large amounts of the famed psilocybe mexicana mushroom and had breakthrough experiences. Tim began to write a lyrical novel (which he showed me).
HARVARD AND THE MAGIC MUSHROOMS
Then, by a golden stroke of history, they learned that Sandos Pharmaceuticals had just synthesized the agents in the psilocybe mushroom into a pink, sugarcoated pill, bound to have a powerful effect on the mind.
Tim took to the phone and locked a deal with Sandos to be given a large stock of the drug to experiment with at Harvard. Sandos was so happy. Tim and Frank were rocking. They arrived at Harvard in early September and cases of the Sandos power pills arrived quickly thereafter, about 2 weeks before I met them.
We got Ben at the airport and drove to Tim’s big house in a Boston suburb, and there I met Tim. The scene had been designed by central casting with consummate genius. We went into a very large and comfortable living room. Ann and I sat on a couch near Tim and Frank. On a round table in front of us was nothing but a plastic drug container of small pink magic pills. On a couch across from us lay a human being, seemingly holding himself stretched out in tension, his arms at his sides. “Who’s that?” I quietly asked Tim. “That’s the chairman of the Harvard psychology department,” said Tim. “He’s having a bad trip.”
I opened the container and spread out some of its hundred pink pills that felt like a potent psychotropic agent, used by shaman and seers of Mexico to access super-reality. The mushroom is called the Flesh of God, I was told.
I asked Tim how many pills the guy took who was laying there fighting the experience. Tim said that was 2 pills. I asked Frank how many pills he had taken the night before to experience death and awareness. Frank said two. Without hesitating I took 12. Tim and Frank were amazed. Ann took two pills.
I was sitting cross-legged on the couch, and there I stayed for hours, unmoving. Ann sometimes sat beside me, but mostly she hung out with Tim, Frank, and Ben. Across from me the professor laid out flat, tense and unmoving, for hours, and I sat cross-legged on the couch, hour after hour, silent, smiling, in open awareness, and having a very good time.
From time to time Tim or Frank would gently come up to me with clipboards, pens, and paper, seeking reports. I smiled at them knowingly, remaining silent. Finally, after several hours, the young poet spoke. I said something like I’d been experiencing the understanding beyond understanding. Ann also had a good trip on her 2 pills. Tim and Frank and Ben all seemed happy with Ann and me. We had done well on the superdrug.
TAKING THE MAGIC PILLS HOME
At my request, Tim gave me a plastic container of 100 of the pink power pills to take home to experiment with. Score that for poetry. Can’t beat that for a first meeting with Tim. I smoked marijuana sometimes, and knew about other traditional drugs, but these pink pills took drug taking into new domain. Tim and I were to become friends, and that house had many memorable gatherings that storied year.
About 7 days later I had my first scheduled session to be attendant at the desk in the Harvard library poetry room. In our apartment I ate six pink pills, took a batch of blank paper and a few pens, kissed Ann goodbye, and went off to work, though public transit to Cambridge, confident that I could extend the English language, right there in the hall of poetry at Harvard, on my very first night on the job.
The drug hit as I started up the steps into the library. Someone who worked there showed me the desk I had to sit at in the poetry room. It was a beauty, with a stately matching chair. I sat down and assumed command. No one bothered me for the 6 hours of my shift, and I wrote 55 pages of excited poetry, working innuendo and overtone in the lyrical flow, finally feeling free as a poet. My language had been chemically liberated. The drug felt like a tool of human development. That was indeed a memorable night.
To add to the generally charming scene Ann and I had landed in, Frank decided that I was “one of the two or three best poets alive.” Stroked my ego big time. I was somehow relieved of my duties at the Harvard library poetry room after the one great session, but I continued to work on good books for Beacon Press and take six pink pills once a week to plunge into untapped potential of language.
LOOKING IN THE MAGIC MIRROR
I bet most people who have ever tripped have at some time felt the urge to look in the mirror and see who they really are, looking yourself right in the eyes. At some point high in the apartment with Ann I got that urge. As soon as I did I got excited. I was going to look into the bathroom mirror head on and see who I really was. That was it. And I went to the mirror and looked and looked. I watched my face develop as fast as I could see. The change was alive and quick. My face was opening, and opening. And then there it was. The change stopped and a face stayed. It was David, the poet king. King David of the psalms. The face had stopped opening and changing. It stayed. I walked away.
I said to myself, “You’d better never tell this to anyone or they’ll think you’re a crazy egoist.” Drugs sure can stir things up.
SAVING WILLIAM BURROUGHS
Frank showed my poetry to Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, who were among many people attracted to the power drugs at Tim’s house. One night Tim called me and asked for my help. He said that he’d brought William Borroughs to America, to his house, to help promote the use of consciousness-expanding drugs in society, but Tim had some big tasks and needed someone to pal with William in the house while he went to his office at Harvard. William at that time was my favorite new writer. I had read Naked Lunch twice. Being asked to take care of William for a while was as much fun as being given the Harvard poetry room to write in.
William had been a heroin junky and was generally nervous, and double nervous about being back in America after decades of living in Morocco. He experienced America as a police state and was in serious need of drugs to calm down. Unfortunately Tim only had the psychedelic power pills, two of which had almost killed William when he arrived the night before. The fact that William had attended college at Harvard was no help at all.
What William needed was some good marijuana, but Tim didn’t have any. Tim left, and William, Ann, and I were alone. In a back room I found some dried psilocybe mushrooms and shredded some which rolled nicely into fat joints which we smoked for a mild buzz.
William calmed down and since he liked young men, and liked Ann, we mellowed into a peaceful zone, under clouds of smoke in a back room in Tim’s house, getting into some free exchanges. Suddenly there was a loud knock and call at the door to the room we were in. I rose and opened the door. Two big Boston policemen were standing there. William froze. I jumped at the cops demanding to know what they were doing in the house without being invited.
I was aggressive. They were at fault and went on the defensive. The room stank of herbal smoke. I moved through the doorway, blocking them and sending them backwards. They were on their heels muttering about looking for two little girls in nightshirts from a slumber party next door.
“What!?” I said with a raised voice, moving them out the back door with my energy. “You walk in this house uninvited looking for little girls in pajamas?! They’re not here but we’ll help you look”. William was delighted. We walked across the yard helping the cops seek the girls, for about two minutes. Then Tim returned with a big take-out dinner, happy to see William smiling and for the moment at ease in America.
THE CITY KILLER DOCKS IN BOSTON HARBOR
Throughout the year Ann and I continued to visit Tim’s house. I knew of his work in the prison system. There were dangers with the drug but important potential for therapy. Various applications were explored.
Later in the year LSD entered the scene. There were visits by Alan Watts and Arthur Koestler. I somehow never connected with Richard Alpert (Ram Das), who had been Tim’s teaching assistant, but I was well-connected with both Tim and Frank. Once Tim and I took mescaline together, sitting by ourselves in a room for hours. That was a mostly nonverbal session. I thought we were both experiencing an acceleration of history and awareness.
Sometime in 1960 Peter pulled into Boston harbor on a guided missile nuclear destroyer, a “city killer”. Peter was 5th in command, responsible for precise hits on cities of “enemy” nations. Peter was lost. Finding Ann and I in Boston then was magic for him.
The very night he arrived was remarkable. He drove directly to the house where Ann and I were living on Beacon Hill. He was with another naval officer, a straight-laced guy but Peter’s good friend. The car was parked down in the street. The two naval officers were on their way to the guided missile destroyer in Boston Harbor. The car was packed with personal gear and a vital military black box assigned to Peter, a crucial part governing the entire missile system.
After a drink or two Peter said he wanted to visit his friend David, who was Peter’s roommate at the University of Michigan and lived in Boston. We squeezed into the car stuffed with gear and a military secret component and drove to David’s apartment on Park Avenue. We spent two hours drinking with David and then it was time to go. Out in the street we found that the car had been stolen!! Peter was going to be in serious trouble as he stepped aboard the new destroyer, and we hadn’t even introduced him to Tim Leary yet.
After things got calmed down on the ship, one day Peter invited us aboard for dinner, with the captain. It was impressive. There was no place to breathe but there was inconceivable technology, an electronic monument to the American military industrial complex. Peter, who we were all sure would be the great American poet when we were young, was lost in a city killer, responsible for strategic controls.
Nothing much happened with Tim and Peter when they did meet. Neither was impressed with the other. Peter was impressed with my poetry however. He made the grand statement that I was writing the poetry he wanted to write. He got depressed and sailed out of Boston.
THE PILLS BECOME POISON
The year ended with a crash for me. I was having one of my 6 pill poetry generation sessions, which had been fruitful and unproblematic on a once a week schedule. This time just minutes into the power ride something went wrong. I began to see only mutilated bodies, hellish disasters, twisting my mind.
I told Ann I was having a bad trip and I was going out to walk it off. I walked along the Charles River, for hours, in a state of profound paranoia and horror, yet able to walk through it. Finally most of the drug effect wore off, but for 10 days or so I was beset by paranoia, and even if I didn’t react to it the state was debilitating.
I went to see Tim. Alan Watts was there. Ideal, right? I had a chance to talk to them both about the downside of that drug experience. The downside was the opposite of liberation. It was self-inflicted sickness. Neither Tim nor Alan was of any help whatsoever. That’s where it ended. I recovered and went on. I never saw Tim again, but his story is well known.
Ann and I went back to New York to live in the land of artists and poets, and I felt the need to be both at once.
DEATH AND THEN LIFE IN THE INTERNATIONAL ART WORLD
When I first met Ann it was Greenwich Village, in 1959, and I was regularly reading my poems at the Gaslight Café, where Alan Ginsberg had recently read Howl, and where young Bob Dylan performed. After we moved back to New York back from Boston we found a classic 4 floor walk-up railroad flat directly across from St. Mark’s church, which was emerging as a world center of poetry.
We were close friends with John Giorno, who had become friends and more with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and other celebrated artists of the Leo Castelli gallery. John had been very smart; now he was becoming very hip. Robert Rauschenberg designed the cover for John’s first small book of poems: Death in America. It was the application of montage and ready-made language to poetry. It had some nasty sexual lines and a repetition echo technique.
Peter had managed to get himself discharged from the Navy essentially doing what I did to get out of the Army. He came to New York and moved in with Ann and me. Peter had a dear girlfriend from the University of Michigan, Marcia Stillman, who became my close friend too. And she was also good friends with John. Marcia sometimes stayed with us too.
For a while Peter and I were a dynamic duo, prone to long exploratory dialogues others would listen to. We clearly loved each other, but he got involved with chemical drugs, and conflict developed between us.
He stayed over less often. One night I told Ann I decided it was too hard for Peter to stay with us anymore. He had come over with a girl heavily drugged on heroin. She slept through 10 hours of conflict between Peter and me. We heard her breathing in the long silences, until 5am.
I was standing by the phone talking to Ann when the phone rang. It was Frances Stillman, Marcia’s sister. Marcia had fallen from her eighth story Park Avenue bedroom window and was crushed on the concrete in the courtyard below. - I had once sat on Marcia’s bedroom window ledge after we had finished a bottle of champagne, and we watched as the empty bottle I dropped hit the pavement below and disappeared.
I went into the room where Peter was standing, near the sleeping girl. He watched me intently as I walked toward him and put my arms out and held him. Head to head I told him Marcia was dead. I said, “Do you want to know how?” He said, “No. I know.” I said nothing. I don’t think he did know. He said he thought I was going to attack him when I approached him. He left with the girl and disappeared for years.
I had a severe reaction to Marcia’s violent death. My nerves were quaking for about three days as Ann held on to me. Several times we started to go to the ER in St. Vincent’s hospital, but we hung in and waited it out.
The day after I calmed down I went to see a kind old doctor. He said that my reaction was an understandable response to the violent death of someone close. I was grateful to him. He didn’t prescribe anything.
John on the other hand had a different response. He asked his uncle who worked for the New York Police Department to get a copy of the official death photograph of Marcia, the body laying crushed on the concrete, in a pool of blood, partly covered by a blanket. He brought the photo to his buddy Andy Warhol who made John an elegant 8 foot by 10 foot vertical silkscreen-on-canvas montage complex, 9 restatements of the photo in varying shades of black and white. John called me up with some excitement and said he had something to show me. I came over and looked. I disliked the elegant arty play with her death image. John chuckled.
THE ADVANCE OF ART IN AMERICA
Peter went to India and stayed in drug scenes and Buddhist monasteries, alternatively. John and I became progressively involved with the use of language in new formats. From 1964 on I directed mid-town New York art galleries and wrote for the art magazines. It was a time when the arts were interactive. Many gifted people participated in each other’s work. John starred in Andy Warhol’s movie “Sleep”, 60 minutes of John sleeping. We participated in “happenings”.
Early in 1963 there was buzz about two Soviet writers being imprisoned because of acting too free. Jackson MacLow, a leading avant-garde poet, organized a protest demonstration outside the Russian embassy, in mid-Manhattan, with police on horseback and additional riot police, in steady rain. Under an awning, one by one poets read their poems into a microphone. It was otherwise very quiet. I waited.
When all were finished I stepped up to the microphone and addressed the Russian embassy: “In my right hand I hold 2 papers of importance to the Soviet government. One concerns the major Chinese spy in America; the other concerns a key Soviet counteragent. I offer both papers to the Soviet government in exchange for the two imprisoned writers. I will read one of the poems.” I read a cool poem about the chief Chinese spy in America. There was some laughter even among the police. Jackson immediately asked for the poem to publish it.
THE LIVING THEATER AND NUCLEAR THEATER
At 8th Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan was the four story theater building owned by Julian Beck and Judith Molina, founders of The Living Theater. They developed a troup of dynamic actors who lived, created, and worked together. Several New York poets were close with them.
I worked with both Julian and Judith on the second World-Wide General Strike for Peace. That consisted of a full page ad in the Nation making our anti-military/industrial establishment statement and reminding the world of the true foundations of liberty and democracy. We also made a public demonstration in which Julian gave a talk that I found luminous, sane, humane, and daring.
Julian was the most noble of men in my eyes. He was a slender and fine man. Police on horseback attacked our demonstration. I was agonized to see a big cop smash Julian’s bald head with his nightstick. There was blood. We were explicitly nonviolent. We understood the risks but knew we had to demonstrate some kind of action against the forces that had made life so endangered.
At our small celebration after our “worldwide strike for peace” 23 year old Bob Dylan sang The Times They Are A’Changin and It’s a Hard Rain Gonna Fall.
I decided to make a direct statement against nuclear proliferation. With Ann’s support, we stood outside the door to the Atomic Energy Commission building in lower Manhattan and gave out a single printed page to those entering the building. We stated the fact that employee collaboration was what made the AEC work, and I asked that employees resign in protest against the military control of atomic energy. Can you believe we did that? Soon there appeared two well-dressed FBI guys. They asked me for my name and address. I was glad to tell them, alive with the liberty of my political action.
LENNY THE LOON
For the young people of America, the Atomic Age brought about the search for drugs and other means that might change the situation from the inside. Getting high on drugs brought you into the high culture, and with it came the first comic of the hip, Lenny Bruce. Ann and I enjoyed his first record:
“Cut to a toy store, any toy store, anywhere in the United States. A kid comes in, takes a Tailspin Tommy comic book, goes up to the counter and says, I’ll take the comic and six jars of airplane glue, please. The store owner says,’ I hope you can sleep tonight Mister Schneider.’” Lenny made voices for the kid and the store owner.
I spoke to Judith Molina of the Living Theater about Lenny. She said yeah he was intense. She said he was supposed to do a benefit performance for the Living Theater but it became impossible. The compensation Lenny wanted was 5 different drugs, two of which even Judith had never heard of.
One night Ann and I decided to go see Lenny in a New York City club where he was performing. It wasn’t a funny act. He mostly made comments about the Kennedy assassination and the Life Magazine article about it, which he was showing the audience, passionately.
After his act I approached him. He was fast talking with a wise guy who seemed to be his agent. I introduced myself to Lenny, and he shook my hand. He was good looking and vibrated with his shoes just touching the ground. I said, “Lenny, here’s one you gotta do, a hip Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
The wise guy agent shoved a quarter at me and said, “Get lost kid” – but Lenny put his arm out and stopped him, saying to me, “Robert, I’m sorry but I’m just not mature enough to perform comedy suggested by someone else.” Sweet. However, a year later he put out a new comedy album and on it was a scenario about a hip Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Then Lenny got busted by the police for obscenity, and he spent the rest of his short life doing something that wasn’t funny, raging against the police and government in his performances. He had become a known hip comic but he lost his sense of humor.
He did a special show at an old movie theater on Second Avenue, two blocks from where Ann and I were living. There was a lot of buzz in New York around the show. The theater was packed beyond capacity. Ann and I were jammed high up in the balcony. Lenny was over an hour late and the place was loud and wild. There were police outside and inside.
Finally Lenny arrived and started speaking into the microphone but the sound was so weak and the acoustics were so bad it was hard to hear any words he said. It was mostly muffled sound. Lenny got louder, raging against the police, who were visible, but his words were mostly boom boggle. At all times the audience was louder than Lenny. He moved around on the stage, shouting at the audience, trying to be heard, pointing to legal papers he had been served with. The frustration level increased. It went on for about an hour until the cops stopped the show, with Lenny raging into the audience and at the cops.
He died shortly afterwards from an overdose of heroin, falling off the toilet in his bathroom, the needle in his arm. And thus humor that once came to him with being high was then lost on the floor of an Atomic Age bathroom.
THE COOL BLUE SUN
In the summer of 1965 I had a job as a poet working with mostly black children in Harlem. The program was called Summer in the City and operated out of a Catholic church on 137th Street. It was blazing hot every day. We were working on having a parade. We were going to make a float for the parade. I had about 14 kids ranging from maybe 7 to 12. I gathered them and said, “Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna make the cool blue sun”. “Really,” I said. “Think about it. Look at that hot sun burning down on us. What do we do? We make a big round ball, like a big snowball. We let it dry in the hot sun and then we paint it cool blue. We ride with it raised up in a truck in the parade, with COOL BLUE SUN signs on both sides of the truck. It’s a joke, get it?”
They did. I brought a big beach ball which we used as the core, and we just kept packing paper mache all around the ball, making it round all around. It was messy fun and everyone worked on it, building our cool blue sun. It took three hours to build and smooth round and three hours to dry, and then we had a big dry grey ball and a can of glossy bright blue spray paint.
And so it was that some of the kids rode on a truck with the cool blue sun held up on a stand, with our signs on the side of the truck. It was a good joke in a hard Harlem summer. You could feel how hard it was.
THE PRIEST AND THE APE
Father Harvey was a young priest who sometimes went with us on trips.
The day we went to the Bronx zoo we took him along. It’s a huge place. We walked up to where several large dramatic ostrich birds were standing. As we approached, one of them turned and walked toward us. It was as big as the priest, it had a big head with two intense eyes, larger than human eyes, and it headed directly to the priest. The ostrich’s body looked unhealthy. Many feathers were broken off showing raw body. The priest was transfixed and obviously having an intense experience. The big bird went right up to the fence we were looking through and went face to face with Father Harvey. We all watched as the bird hypnotized him and then walked away. I swear this is true.
I asked the two oldest kids to each hold one of Father Harvey’s hands and hold onto him as we went into the house of great apes. Inside we came immediately to the cage of an enormous orangutan. She was upside-down against the back of the cage with a carrot coming out of her mouth and her eyes were darting from side to side watching big water beetles scurry on the floor. When she saw us she turned over and took two big steps across the cage to where we were. She bent down to us and looked right into the Father Harvey’s face. Then she reached under herself with her right hand, took something from her ass or cunt, smelled it and offered it to the priest. I really thought he might collapse, so we turned him around and slowly walked him back to the car. Everyone else had a good time.
BRION GYSIN AND THE INGENIUS LAMP
In 1966 John Giorno and I were each living on East 9th street, a few buildings apart, in a neighborhood containing artists and poets. One day John called me on the phone to see if I could come over and meet Brion Gysin. I said yes. I knew that John had been close friends with William Boroughs and Brion for years.
I told Brion that I had had seen a work of his in the window of the American Bookstore in Paris and I really liked it. I described it as a lamp with a soft gold lamp shade that revolved slowly around a light bulb - with small calligraphic figures cut into the lamp shade, unique luminous energy figurations for your brain, perhaps to free conditioned patterning. I said something like that. Brion said that it was an excellent description.
John wanted to play an audio tape that Brion had made. Brion said it wouldn't be good unless we had some good pot. I said I had some in my apartment, went home for 5 minutes, returning with three big joints.
The audio pieces were interesting. Brion had recorded his voice statements and edited them into short experimental sound poems, using repetition. John was to adopt those sound techniques and the cut-up technique in his language work.
Then I told John and Brion the story of the night I spent with William Boroughs at Tim Leary's house in Boston. William and Brion had lived together in Morocco for many years, where the cryptic lampshade was cut.
For years William worked in his room, writing, while Brion produced a variety of projects including newspaper cut-ups, and some very interesting work that has disappeared. I was glad John was close friends with them both.
SHOCK IN THE DEER PARK
Between 1963 and 1969 I spent several summers on Monhegan Island, 8 miles off the coast of Maine. I rented a cabin on the edge of the island’s interior pine forest, near “Cathedral Woods”. The eastern side of the island was dominated by three prominent silver rock cliffs, White Head, Burnt Head, and Black Head. They each rose more than 100 feet above the ocean, which sometimes crashed powerfully against the rock, sending spume flying way up the cliffs. But in the summers it was mostly calm.
White Head, the central prominence, more than 150 feet above the water, was an ideal place to watch the sun rise, facing due East across the Atlantic Ocean. In fact the great physical beauty of White Head coupled with its due East orientation makes White Head a power place. So are the interior forests of the island.
One day I was sitting in the woods in a teepee that some boys had built and abandoned. I liked to sit just inside the doorway and write. As I was writing two deer came along, a beautiful male and female couple, about two years old. They were slowly eating their way along in what looked like free movement. I could see they were free.
They didn’t sense me in the teepee and I stayed still. They stopped about ten feet away. And then she did something to him so beautiful I wish it on every male of every species to make them peaceful. She licked him in a long sweep of her tongue, through his fur, across his left flank. And then she brought her head back to where she began and she licked him again all across his left side. And then she gracefully brought her head back and she licked him again, and again, and again, clearly getting pleasure from caressing him that way. And the buck held still while he took the licking, looking around to see if any edible plants were near enough to get to without moving his legs.
Suddenly something shocking happened. In a flash my heart was beating hard in my chest. About 100 feet away was the grandfather grandmaster deer of all time. It was very big for a deer, a big body and big head with massive antlers, a white beard, and big piercing eyes looking right at me. It was not an elk. It was more unusual, a very old, very large, very conscious deer.
He saw me quickly from 100 feet away while the younger deer didn’t sense me from close range. I wanted him to come near but my heart was making enough noise to scare him off. The other two deer left. I knew that I might have only another second or two of encounter with the great deer. As we looked directly at each other I was hoping for a magical communiqué. And something psychic happened to me. A memorable flash. Then he turned around and went away. That was not an ordinary deer; I think he gave initiation.
I never saw him again.
SOFT SHOCK IN THE WOODS
One day I was walking slowly along, deep in the woods, when I stopped cold in my tracks. About 50 feet away, looking directly at me, was a young woman sitting in meditation posture. I stood still and we continued to look directly into each other’s eyes. It was a moment of stillness and calm.
There were two options. Either I leave her alone to meditate and I walk on, or I go over to her and sit down, and we speak. We watched each other for about thirty long seconds, and then I carefully went over to her to meet.
She was red headed, physically beautiful, with an excellent voice and laugh. Her name was Gail Varsi, from California, recently separated from her husband, a promising California poet. Gail was on the East Coast visiting her sister Diane, the actress who made five movies for 20th Century Fox before she was 20 and then left Hollywood to go to college at Bennington, in Vermont. Diane lived in Brooklyn at that time with her two children.
Gail and I didn’t talk long in the woods. I was in a solitary mood. She asked me where I lived. I said, ironically, in a cabin at the edge of the woods. There were several such cabins on the island, but I wasn’t expecting a visit.
I took a particularly long walk in the woods, wending back to my cabin. As I arrived, there was Gail, knocking at my door. “How did you possibly find this cabin”, I asked her. “You told me where it was,” she said, looking all the way into my eyes.
Gail and I became close fast. She introduced me to Diane and then went back to the West Coast to settle things with her young husband. I didn’t know when I’d see her again, but I felt a perfect connection with her. Meanwhile I also connected with Diane. Fact is that woman was so stunningly beautiful as well as smart that since she was warm and friendly with me I got excited. But it turned out that it wasn’t me Diane was meant for. Believe it or not, it was Russell.
STUPIDITY AND THE NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE
One day I left my apartment on 9th Street to go to work. I was an editor for the director of the Fine Books division of Holt, Winston & Rinehart, the 4th largest publisher. I was wearing a suit and necktie under a raincoat. It was marvelously snowing heavily as I left my building. Heavy snow in Manhattan is rare and transformational. It makes the hard city soft, purified with big white crystals coming down fast. I was carrying an umbrella, folded under my arm, reading a letter I took from my mailbox on the way out.
Going into Thompkins Square Park, on my way to the subway station, I noticed that there were many black and Puerto Rican guys in the park, and some of them were throwing snowballs hard at old Polish people who liked to sit in the park. Right in front of me a high school aged kid smashed an old Polish man with a big clump of packed snow. Involuntarily I shouted at him, “Hey, are you crazy doing that?”
Suddenly, like I had said the magic words, everything stopped. Many guys were looking at me. The kid I yelled at got energy from his associates, and said to me, “Yeah mister. I’m crazy. Do you want to do something about it?”
There was no time to think. I knew I had walked into a lion’s den. I quickly made my umbrella into a weapon, facing god-knows-what guns and knives in the tough group I’d engaged. Mustering all the quick wisdom I could find, I shifted my body and gaze so that I was facing the field in general, and I made the boldest move I ever made. I faced the field with force and I said, “Okay, one of you guys come out,” taking a step toward them and standing like a tiger. No one moved, for a crucial 2 or 3 seconds, while my life was in the balance. I had used wit to save myself from my stupidity. I had commanded the field for the crucial moment. I turned, and walked away, taking only one snowball on the way out. Stupid and lucky, but don’t engrave that on my tombstone.
SAVING RUSSELL FROM HIS GUN
At that time Russell was living in New York, not too far from East 9th Street where John Giorno and I lived. Russ was working for a prominent architecture firm. One day he came pounding at my door. I let him in. He had on a long coat with the collar turned up and his 357 magnum in his coat pocket. He was very nervous. He said the cops might be after him any minute.
What happened was that it was a cold day and Russ turned on the gas oven in his kitchen forgetting that he stored his loaded gun in there. He heard people’s voices in the courtyard below. Russ went to the window, opened it, and looked down. Down in the courtyard there were police and a dead body, with a white outline sprayed around it. Russ thought the cops might suspect him because of his gun, which he forgot was cooking in the oven. Suddenly the gun went off!!
Russ hit the floor terrified that he’d be caught by the cops or killed by his own gun. The cops had to hear it. He crawled cautiously toward the stove to try to prevent the gun from firing again but it fired again. Imagine how loud and dangerous that was. The bullet had fired in Russ’s direction. Then the gun stopped, for about 10 seconds. He grabbed it from the stove. The barrel had bent and it was hot. He got it into his coat pocket. He desperately tried direct escape from his building and succeeded. He ran to where I lived. He calmed down a little and left the twisted gun with me, still unsure if they’d be looking for him. Three days later we threw the gun off the Brooklyn Bridge, a very small step toward world peace.
RUSS EMERGES AS A FILM ARTIST AND MARRIES A STAR
Then he pulled himself together again for a time. He moved to his own little studio building. He bought a 16 mm movie camera and started shooting. He was good right away. He shot a short movie of Sean Connery, who was making a James Bond movie that was set by chance right next to where Russell lived. As Russ opened his front door that day and found a smiling Connery, well-lighted, looking at him, he knew his luck was changing.
When Russ’s nice little 10 minute movie, starring Sean Connery, was finished he invited friends to come to his studio to see it. I invited Diane Varsi. She came to my apartment on 9th Street wearing a black leather jacket and tight black slacks, with her long blond hair in braids, and the magic was in her that night. She was so present and whole at that moment that you could see a rare beauty in her. We walked through Thompkins’s Square Park to Russell’s studio house. As Russ opened his door and saw Diane he fell all out in love for the first time in his life.
I wrote a movie for them both, to bring out Russell’s visual talent and depths Diane wanted to express. She periodically had grand mal seizures. When acting, she brought out powerful images with simple movements.
It took a year. It was called Ring. It was a 45 minute work good enough to be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art film library. Diane and Russ did fall in love, and even got married. Russ, for the moment, was the most together he had ever been. But of course things have to change, and Russ had reasons to be paranoid.
BREAKING THROUGH
In 1966 I was keenly interested in innovations in 2, 3, and 4 dimensional visual art. Important changes were in the air. It was a time of experimentation in art and technology. The sense of a wide-open creative field seemed to energize the arts in general.
I was earning a modest living as director of the Spectrum Gallery, a large co-operative exhibition space on 57th Street, in the heart of the “art world.” Like several of my poet friends, I was an art critic. I wrote for Arts Magazine and the 57th Street Review, published by the Parsons Gallery.
As knowledgeable and interested as poets were in the innovations in the visual arts, many of us were entering new domains in our own work with language. A number of us began to emerge as dual verbal and visual talents. I had been producing photomontage art since 1965, much like visions cinema creates with digital effects now. My image work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and other museums.
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I still considered language my primary work and my image art secondary, in spite of the fact that some of my art critic poet friends considered my artwork better than my poetry.
I was more concerned with the poetry readings I gave and the publication of my poems, but my artwork was being shown in prominent NYC galleries and museums.
1966 was a pivotal year for me. Except for two long concrete poems, I stopped writing compositional poetry, the kind you stand up and read aloud, in public. I went private with my work. I began working on a book centered on photographs of eyes, mostly human. It was a process that was to take almost two years to perfect to my satisfaction.
The eyes were cut out of the context of the face in a horizontal strip 2 to 4 inches wide. Taking them out of their original context allowed me to work with what I saw in the eyes in another context. Above and below the eyes were words, serving as captions. You read the words above, which syntactically pivoted through the eyes, and you concluded in the caption below.
In working the words with the image, I was getting more precise meanings than I’d been able to work from language alone. The pages and the book size were 9 by 12 inches. The book looked like a human head with prominent eyes. On the cover, above my eyes, was the title, SIGNS. Below the eyes was my name. It was a simplified and precise use of language interrelated with image, as in advertising design, seeing into the human image.
In the process of evolving that dual verbal-visual form I worked with hundreds of images, many from excellent photographers. After about a year I showed a few pages to poet friends. I was told that I was penetrating to a new ground of language function in the form of the picture book I was working on. It was finished in May, 1967 and was featured in a Dwan Gallery exhibition called Language.
At the same time (1967- 68) I was working with words and photographs of the human face, I was also working with words on mirrors, getting language to function with living imagery, the live mirror image. The mirror work would need carefully-designed and controlled exhibition space, where the space and timing of the use of language and image was well-managed. There was no existing presentation format for such work at that time. I needed an exhibition space where language was a primary factor in the art.
I was very aware that various poet friends of mine were engaged in work best presented in a spatial format. In short, at that moment in history, poets needed an art gallery.
There was a studio space available for our purposes, definitely off the established gallery path. It was on East 81st Street, off Broadway. It was fated to be a successful off-Broadway art gallery, founded by poets. Since many of the art critics of the time were poets, and since many of them were interested in innovations in language and its relationship with visual processes, there was a good chance that such poets could bring such a gallery to life.
GAIN GROUND
The studio was at 269 East 81st Street, on the top floor of the building, the 7th floor, well above the street. The space was 40 feet by 40 feet in size, with an overhead skylight. It was leased by Naomi Dash, who became co-director with me, believing in the vision. At this point it just needed a name. It took me about 10 days. When it came, it came with a boom: Gain Ground. In reviewing our first one man show, John Perreault, a prominent art critic of that time, wrote that Gain Ground was the best name for an art gallery he’d ever heard.
After much preparation, in April, 1967, Gain Ground opened with a rocking first show, a large collection of art works made by poets. For that show, and for all the following Gain Ground documentation, I am indebted to the New Museum exhibition of 1981, “Alternatives in Retrospect,” curated by Jackie Apple. The catalogue, with an essay by Mary Delahoyd, is my source for much of the information that follows.
The first Gain Ground exhibition was called: Bookwork Art, Objects Made by Poets, Word Art, and Poet Visions. Among the talents represented were Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, Carol Berge, Charles Frazier, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Ron Gross, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Jackson MacLow, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Newman, John Perreault, Patricia Sloan, Hannah Weiner, and others.
John Giorno offered a silk-screened poster keyed on the repetition of the words “I’m tired of being afraid.”
I showed my first speaking mirror, catching your live image in the mirror with an inescapable caption:
HERE’S A LIVE PHOTOGRAPH OF YOU
HOWEVER YOU THINK YOU LOOK
There were some very gifted original works. The panorama of word-operative artworks was so rich that some visitors came two and three times to try to take it all in, over the 4 week installation period.
Besides works on the walls and free-standing works there were three reading tables with chairs. On one long table there were three artwork books, the first of that art form ever exhibited: my book SIGNS; Carol Skylark's brilliant 8 ½ by 11 inch book of exquisite cartoon-like drawings of human imagery with evocative hand-written legends; and a gifted book of cut-out words and images by Patricia Sloan. SIGNS was then exhibited at the Dwan Gallery in May 67.
ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC MIRRORS
A month later at Gain Ground I followed with an eight-chambered magic theater called Rooms with Electric Mirrors. You entered through silver satin curtains in the gallery door into the first chamber, the Magic Well. Before you was a round lucite table with a mirror center. Above and below the mirror on the lucite were the words
LOOKING DOWN INTO THE MAGIC WELL
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WILD IMAGES IN THE FACE
You approached the table edge and looked down into the mirror, and as you bent over the face in the mirror came up to you, from below, alive with species implications. You could see your ancestors and new faces as fast as you could see. You knew why there were so many wild images in the face.
You exited out the back of that chamber into a room of 7 glimmering silver satin chambers. Most people entered the chamber to the immediate left first. And there you were, well-lighted and framed raw in a live photograph machine consisting of a full-length mirror with words. The words were captions that caught your image:
LOOK WHO’S ALIVE
SEE WHO MOVES
The words alive and move worked with your live image to make you the dramatic subject of a work of pictorial art. And there were 7 other live photograph chambers in which, one by one, you were the dynamic subject.
POWER THRONE
In 1968 I produced another Gain Ground show reversing the subject-object relationship to get something alive in a work of art: Power Throne. The exhibition consisted of two rooms, for one person at a time, in which you were immersed in different fields of heart sound.
When it was your turn, an attendant guided you to the inner chamber and parted the curtains for you to enter a red fabric throne room. Two priestesses in ruby dresses came to you graciously to seat you in the power throne.
The throne itself was a transformed dentist's chair, with racks of electronic equipment behind it. A red velvet sash was placed across your chest and your hands were placed one over the other over your heart. What you didn't know was that you were holding a very fine electronic stethoscope over your heart, and concealed behind the throne was the technology called harmonic compression, developed by Bell Labs, that would help you hear in a new way.
After you were gently seated and unknowingly stethoscoped, you relaxed. The priestesses disappeared behind you to work the equipment sensitively. In the first phase you heard your heart beat coming from 4 speakers in the walls of the chamber, with more information audible in the heart sound than anyone had ever heard. The sound system was designed by Norman Dolff of Columbia Records and engineered by Phillips Electronics. There was an immediately perceptible feedback field.
Then the priestesses placed a pair of hi-tec head phones over your ears and you heard the full expression of your heart in your brain. After a minute a voice entered the electronic mix with your heart sound, a voice in harmonic compression, twice the speed as normal speech but with the same pitch as normal speech, so you hear twice as fast. And the words you hear help you know what is beating in your heart:
YOU WON'T KNOW WHAT THE BLOODHEART IN YOU IS FROM MEDICAL
DEFINITIONS OF THE HEART, BUT THE DIAGRAMS OF ITS ELECTRIC
TISSUE WORKS ARE GOOD TO HAVE. THE ELECTRIC MECHANICS OF
THE POWERFUL ORGAN ARE HOT INTANGIBLE, BUT IF SOMETHING
GOES WRONG THERE THE WHOLE BODY OF LIFE HAS THE PAIN.
WHO KNOWS WHAT'S WORKING MIRACLES RED ALL LIVE IN YOU.
WHAT RUNS YOUR ORGANS GLEAMING WITH WHAT THEY DO.
WHO KNOWS WHAT ELECTRIC LIQUIDS CREATE IN YOUR HEAD.
THE UNIVERSE IS EMPTY WITH WHATEVER BEAT YOU HAVE.
HOW SHOULD YOU KNOW THE SPEED OF YOUR FLESH IN ITS ACTION.
IS IT REALLY BEST TO NOT KNOW YOUR ELECTRIC RUSH.
HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR HEART VIBRATE SUPERNATURAL TISSUES.
OR DO YOU ONLY FEEL YOUR HEART WHEN YOU'RE FRIGHTENED.
OR WHEN YOU MAY BE A LITTLE WORRIED YOU'VE OVERPUMPED IT.
OR AREN'T YOU THE ONE WHO'S PUMPING YOUR INCREDIBLE FLESH.
YOU MUST BE THE ONE WHO'S ALIVE IN YOUR HEART IN THE THROBBING,
OR AREN'T YOU BEING WORKED IN THE HEART YOU HAVE.
YOUR HEART IS SO RICH WITH BLOOD YOU MAY BE ALL LOVE IN IT,
NO MATTER WHAT YOUR GENES ARE DESIGNED TO BEAR.
THE BLOODFLESH OF YOU MAKES ITS CORONARY MAJESTY,
SO WHATEVER YOU CAN CATCH YOUR HEART WITH YOU BETTER GET.
DON'T HOPE THAT SLEEP WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SOMETHING ELSE.
THE HEART BEATING IN YOU CAN GO EVEN FASTER IN SLEEP.
“…Two silent red-robed girls glide forward in the redness, seat you in a throne, place a red satin cloth on your chest that sets a concealed electronic stethoscope over your heart and from the speakers in the walls of the chamber you are surrounded by the sounds of your own heart beating steady erratic ever-changing hypnotic magnified beats, turning you inside out, making the chamber an enlargement of your body with you at its core…”
Kim Levin, Artnews, March, 1970
“…You are brought through several phases of a heartsound feedback system, encouraging psychic shift to the energies of your heart, to the sound energy mind of your heart…”
Carter Ratcliff, Art International, March, 1970
“Robert Newman’s Power Throne makes a very strong departure from Artaud by effecting a welcome return to the center theme, or ‘matrixed’ presentation…Human gesture punctuates the drama and modifies the effective dimensions of the performance area. All steps in your performance form are set and you complete them. The performance, the spectator-performer, and the author become one in live, nonrepeatable, majestic heart energy, which is THE WORK ITSELF.”
Rita Simon, Arts Magazine, March, 1969
At that time there was a respected art curator, Jim Harithas, who had been director of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC and who was a front-runner for the vacant position of director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jim had been told about my Rooms with Electric Mirrors show, but missed it. When he heard about Power Throne he came to New York to see it. He called a couple of days later and came over to hang out. He said that after he experienced Power Throne he gave a lecture on art history at Hunter College and spoke about my show, telling them it was “a turning point in art history, a major change of perspective.” He wanted to do the show at MOMA when he was appointed director, but that didn’t happen.
WOODSTOCK AT GAIN GROUND
Summer 1969 was vacation time for Gain Ground. The space wasn’t used much. I was upstate New York working on an optical sundial. Also upstate New York, about 50 miles south of where I was, from August 15-18th, the famous Woodstock music festival happened. About August 20th I returned to New York City and found that the largest studio on the same floor as Gain Ground was occupied by the people that had filmed the Woodstock Festival and now were working with great intensity to produce the movie. They were in dire need of more workspace. They came in to visit and talk to me as part of an inevitable move into our space. And so it was that the final editing of the successful movie was in reality done at Gain Ground, and that’s one Gain Ground installation that was like a gift from beyond. They paid us a lot of money for the use of our space for five weeks, money which helped keep Gain Ground going a little longer.
In her chronicle for the New Museum catalogue, “Alternatives in Retrospect” Mary Delahoyd concluded:
“After early spring 1970 the activity at Gain Ground ceased, but this alternative space continued to sponsor programs elsewhere in New York.
A performance with installation by Juan Downey and a program of works by various poet film-makers took place at the Cinematique…Despite the transient dimension of these last events sponsored by Gain Ground, this place had provoked a new symbiosis of verbal and visual expression.”
THE SKY MIRROR SUNDIAL AND THE GALAXY
1970 was a pivotal year for me. I had been in the Gurdjieff “Work” since 1967 and had used it to confuse my art flow. I saw my creative passion as egoism and I stopped creating. Then my mentor in the Work had an insight and put me together with Martin Benson, then in his 80s, said to be Gurdjieff’s most realized student. He was kind of an artist. He had just finished directing a team of people to help him build a classical aeolian harp. It was a thing of beauty, responding to air movement with octaves of living air song within and beyond human hearing range.
He took a good look at me and said, “Bells, Buddhist bells. You should study that.” Mr. Benson found books on bell making and Buddhist bells for me, asking me to study them and draw bell forms. Interesting. In 1974, in Colorado, I was to direct a team of four people to produce Buddhist hand bells.
Someone in the Gurdjieff Foundation mentioned that it would be good to have a sundial at the estate where we “worked” on weekends. In a flash I saw something. My art flow had been stopped for months but I couldn’t stop this one. I saw a sundial made of light-responsive materials, instead of the typical metal or stone sundials. I saw a mirror about 36 inches in diameter with a large cut prism on the surface, with its apex about 9 inches high. The angles of the prism would be based on the latitude and longitude of the site the dial was made for. Clear plastics had become available that could be milled with great precision and would not deteriorate through years of exposure to the sun.
In order that the gnomon prism could cast a visible time-telling shadow on the mirror surface, I had to spray-paint the mirror surface silver in exactly the form defined by the time of solar movement for the sundial location. Since I’d never made a sundial I thought it would be right to build one for practice before we built one for the Work.
Rick Sharpe of the math department at Princeton did the math. Arturo Cuetara, a very gifted artist working in Lucite, cut the time-telling prism on a Bridgeport milling machine with Rick watching. I sprayed the specific silver form on the mirror, the form Rick defined as the total path of movement of the gnomon’s shadow throughout the year. It looked like a gate to the sky that was reflected in the mirror. I cut the hour lines through the painted form with a razor blade. It really did tell the time accurately, with a bold prismatic response to the rays of the sun.
The optical sundial photographed beautifully. Various film studies and still photos were made. I had stepped back from the art world for the moment but I was very glad we accomplished this fine collaboration. I showed some of the photos of the sundial to Mr. Benson. He studied them. Someone else standing near said, “What’s that?” “What’s that? What’s that?” Benson responded. “That’s Robert Newman’s sundial. That’s the galaxy. That’s our aspiration.” That’s the best review of one of my artworks I’ve ever had.
Also in 1970 I met the dynamic and compelling Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in New York City. He was 35 years old, handsome, well-dressed in a western suit. He looked like a sacred incarnation Tibetan prince to my eyes. After a seminar he gave I had an interview with him that was powerful for me. We agreed to work together.
Rinpoche had just come to America and had started to attract people, including various poets and artists, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and myself among them. Rinpoche was very interested in my art work and was warm and open to me. I showed him a film study of the sundial. Mid-film he turned to me and said sincerely, “It’s very beautiful.”
Later he said that I should be very careful about meditation, to never let it stop my flow as an artist. He said that many poets and artists had been approaching him, many of them becoming his students. He said “They’re all imitating the magician. You are a magician. Don’t mess it up with meditation.”
I did opt for the intensive study and practice of meditation under his direction for 10 years, and art and language projects kept emerging.
What I didn’t anticipate was that the Vipashyana meditation that I learned, mindful/awareness meditation, was to become accepted by the medical establishment as practical mind/body medicine. And I didn’t anticipate that the language I would develop to transmit Buddhist methods for medical and childbirth applications, 1997-2014, would be some of the best and most satisfying work I was to achieve. In 1970, with Trungpa Rinpoche, I was starting to learn methods which would be essential to my work in mind/body medicine.
COMEDY AND BLACK FLIES IN THE SHRINE ROOM
Trungpa Rinpoche’s meditation center in Vermont was called Tail of the Tiger in 1970. Now it’s Karma Choling. It was a big old wooden farm house. The largest room on the second floor was used as the shrine room. There were extended periods of sitting meditation. With no screens on the windows the place was full of black flies in the summer months. The flies were friends of meditation.
You’d be trying to sit, to shift your attention from your mind to your awareness, with patience and perseverance, and there would always be at least 6 or 7 black flies walking on your arms, face, and feet. If you tried to whack a fly you looked uncool, even disturbed. We didn’t kill insects. But then you quickly learned that they didn’t bite. They just walked around on you like an itch for 10 or 12 seconds and flew on, but there were always some on you, on your eyelids looking into your eyes, on your lips trying to get into your mouth, on and in your ears. And you learned to not react to the flies as you learned to not react to your mind. Today I imagine that shrine room to be screened and air conditioned, but I believe that black flies are the way to go.
How much can you ignore the flies? One day we were sitting in a meditation session when suddenly there was a hilarious incident. A very tall very loud poet had fallen sound asleep while meditating and actually keeled all the way over, crashing against the metal baseboard on the wall. You had to be very big and very asleep to keel over that far and hard, and you had to hit that metal unit at the bottom of the wall to make that big a crash. Generally in the shrine rooms you had to be careful for outbreaks of giggles, which can be contagious, but the poet crash was so funny that laughter came back in waves for more than an hour, until lunch. Truth is, I’m still chuckling over that one, part of the intensive training I went through.
OPENING GREAT WALLS
In the summer of 1970 there was a lot of buzz in the SOHO art gallery district. A big renovation project caught the eyes of the local gallery establishments and the artists. The world’s largest art gallery was being built. The rumor was it didn’t have an art director yet. It was called the Reese Palley Gallery. Reese offered the director job to Jim Harithas. Jim told Reese that he’d only take the job in unison with me and a woman curator he knew from Washington. Reese said fine. Just before the galley was to open Jim got very upset over something said about him in Time Magazine and he refused to commit to Reese.
The gallery finally had its grand champagne opening. More than a thousand people attended according to the New York Times. A good but unexceptional show of large abstract paintings was on the walls, chosen by Reese. It was a very festive occasion, celebrating a big new art gallery space. When I arrived it was jammed. It was hard to see, hard to get through. I did see a young couple in the crowd fucking against a pillar.
Suddenly someone grabbed my arm. It was Reese’s primary advisor, Harry.
“We’ve been looking for you,” he said. He took me to Reese’s office and locked the door behind us. Reese said, “Do you realize how crazy this is for me? Jim Harithas won’t commit. He’s angry at the world. Can you take over?” I said, “Yes, don’t worry, but I’ve got to speak to Jim.”
Leaving Reese’s office and reentering the crowd in the gallery was good theater for me. The first floor exhibition space with its 20 foot high ceiling was the grandest in New York, and lost in the crowd I was secretly the director. There were several magnificent show walls.
That night I envisioned the first show: Opening Great Walls. I knew several artists, including myself, who would love that creative challenge – but it wasn’t meant to happen. Chaos ensued. I left for a teaching position in the City University of New York (CUNY) on Staten Island. Eventually Jim did take the job. I focused on my own art work, meditation, and teaching.