Just Kids [32]
I dragged my portfolio from gallery to gallery. We joined a troupe of street musicians and busked for change. I worked on my drawings and wrote and Linda took photographs. We ate bread and cheese, drank Algerian wine, contracted lice, wore boatneck shirts, and shuffled happily through the backstreets of Paris.
We saw Godard’s One Plus One. The film made a huge impression on me politically and renewed my affection for the Rolling Stones. Only days later, the French papers were covered with the face of Brian Jones: Est Mort, 24 Ans. I mourned the fact that we could not attend the free concert the remaining Stones held in his memory for over 250,000 in Hyde Park, culminating with Mick Jagger releasing scores of white doves into the London sky. I laid my drawing pencils aside and began a cycle of poems to Brian Jones, for the first time expressing my love for rock and roll within my own work.
One of the highlights of our days was our trek to the American Express office to send and receive mail. There was always something from Robert, funny little letters describing his work, his health, his trials, and always his love.
He had temporarily moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, sharing a loft on Delancey Street with Terry, with whom he still had an amicable friendship, and a couple of Terry’s friends who had a moving company. Work as a mover afforded Robert pocket money, and the loft had enough raw space for him to continue developing his art.
His first letters seemed a bit down but brightened when he described seeing Midnight Cowboy for the first time. It was unusual for Robert to go to a movie, but he took this film to heart. “It’s about a cowboy stud on 42nd Street,” he wrote me, and called it a “masterpiece.” He felt a deep identification with the hero, infusing the idea of the hustler into his work, and then into his life. “Hustler-hustler-hustler. I guess that’s what I’m about.”
Sometimes he seemed lost. I would read his letters, wishing I could be home by his side. “Patti—wanted to cry so bad,” he wrote, “but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti—I don’t know anything.”
He would take the F train to Times Square, mingling with the cons, pimps, and prostitutes in what he called “the Garden of Perversion.” He took a picture for me in a photo booth, wearing the peacoat I gave him and peering from beneath an old French naval cap; it has always been my favorite photograph of him.
In response I made a collage drawing for him called My Hustler, where I used one of his letters as a component. Even as he reassured me that I had nothing to worry about, he seemed to be moving deeper into the sexual underworld that he was portraying in his art. He seemed to be attracted to S&M imagery—“I’m not sure what that all means—just know it’s good”—and described to me works titled Tight Fucking Pants, and drawings in which he lacerated S&M characters with a matte knife. “I have a hook coming out of where his prick should be, where I’m gonna hang that chain with dice and skulls from it.” He spoke of using bloody bandages and starred patches of gauze.
He wasn’t merely jerking off. He was filtering this world through his own aesthetic, criticizing a movie called Male Magazine as “nothing more than an exploitation film using an all male cast.” When he visited the Tool Box, an S&M bar, he felt it was “just a bunch of big chains and shit on the wall, nothing really exciting,” and wished he could design a place like that.
As the weeks went on, I worried that he wasn’t doing well. It wasn’t like him to complain about his physical condition. “My mouth is sick,” he wrote, “my gums are white and achy.” He sometimes didn’t have enough money to eat.
His P.S. was still filled with Robert bravado. “I’ve been accused of dressing like a hustler, having the mind of a hustler and the body of one.
“Still love you through it all,” he ended, signing it “Robert” with the t forming a blue star,