Just Kids [52]
Looking up, we were struck by the ingenuous humanity of this New York City tableau. Robert took my hand, and as the snow swirled around us I glanced at his face. He narrowed his eyes and nodded in affirmation, impressed to see artists take on Forty-second Street. For me it was the message. For Robert, the medium.
Newly inspired, we walked back to Twenty-third Street to look at our space. The necklaces hung on hooks and he had tacked up some of our drawings. We stood at the window and looked out at the snow falling beyond the fluorescent Oasis sign with its squiggly palm tree. “Look,” he said, “it’s snowing in the desert.” I thought about a scene in Howard Hawks’s movie Scarface where Paul Muni and his girl are looking out the window at a neon sign that said The World Is Yours. Robert squeezed my hand.
The sixties were coming to an end. Robert and I celebrated our birthdays. Robert turned twenty-three. Then I turned twenty-three. The perfect prime number. Robert made me a tie rack with the image of the Virgin Mary. I gave him seven silver skulls on a length of leather. He wore the skulls. I wore a tie. We felt ready for the seventies.
“It’s our decade,” he said.
Viva stormed into the lobby with a Garbo-like inapproachability, attempting to intimidate Mr. Bard so he wouldn’t ask her for back rent. The filmmaker Shirley Clarke and the photographer Diane Arbus entered separately, each with a sense of agitated mission. Jonas Mekas, with his ever-present camera and secret smile, shot the obscure corners of life surrounding the Chelsea. I stood there holding a stuffed black crow I had bought for next to nothing from the Museum of the American Indian. I think they wanted to get rid of it. I had decided to name it Raymond, after Raymond Roussel, who wrote Locus Solus. I was thinking what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dalí. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: “You are like a crow, a gothic crow.”
“Well,” I said to Raymond, “just another day at the Chelsea.”
In mid-January we met Steve Paul, who managed Johnny Winter. Steve was a charismatic entrepreneur who had provided the sixties with one of the great rock clubs in New York City, the Scene. Located on a side street near Times Square, it became a gathering spot for visiting musicians and late-night jams. Dressed in blue velvet and perpetually bemused, he was a bit of Oscar Wilde, a bit of the Cheshire Cat. He was negotiating a recording contract for Johnny, and had installed him in a suite of rooms at the Chelsea.
We all collided one evening at the El Quixote. In the short time that we spent with Johnny, I was intrigued by his intelligence and instinctive appreciation of art. In conversation he was open, and benevolently strange. We were invited to see him play at the Fillmore East, and I had never seen a performer interact with his audience with such complete assurance. He was fearless and joyously confrontational, spinning like a dervish and stalking the stage swinging the veil of his pure white hair. Fast and fluid on guitar, he transfixed the crowd with his misaligned eyes and playfully demonic smile.
On Groundhog Day we attended a small party in the hotel for Johnny, to celebrate his signing with Columbia Records. We spent most of the evening rapping with Johnny and Steve Paul. Johnny admired Robert’s necklaces and offered to buy one; they also spoke of Robert designing him a black net cape.
As I sat there I noticed that I felt physically unstable, malleable, as if I were made of clay. No one seemed to indicate that I had changed in any way. Johnny’s hair seemed to droop like two long white ears. Steve Paul, in his blue velvet, was leaning into a mound of pillows, chain-smoking joints in slow motion,