Just Kids [63]
Later that night at Max’s, I ran into Tony Ingrassia, a playwright who worked out of La MaMa. He asked me to read for a role in his new play Island. I was a little skeptical, but as he handed me the script, he promised no pancake makeup and no glitter.
It seemed an easy role for me because I didn’t have to relate to any of the characters in the play. My character, Leona, was totally self-involved, shot speed, and rambled incoherently about Brian Jones. I was never completely certain what the play was about, but it was Tony Ingrassia’s epic. Like The Manchurian Candidate, everybody was in it.
I wore my frayed boatneck shirt and rubbed kohl around my eyes as I had to appear at my worst. I guess I achieved a sort of junkie raccoon look. I had a vomit scene. That was no problem. I just held a sizable amount of crushed peas and wet cornmeal in my mouth for several minutes before I let it fly. But one night at rehearsal Tony brought me a syringe and said casually, “Just shoot water, you know, pull a little blood out of your arm and people will think you’re shooting up.”
I almost fainted. I couldn’t even look at the syringe, let alone put it in my arm. “I’m not doing that,” I said.
They were shocked. “You never shot up?”
Everyone took it for granted that I did drugs because of the way I looked. I refused to shoot up. Finally they slapped hot wax on my arm and Tony showed me what to do.
Robert thought it was hilarious that I should be in such a fix and teased me relentlessly about it. He knew well my needle phobia. He liked to see me onstage. He would attend all the rehearsals, so incredibly dressed he was worthy of a part himself. Tony Ingrassia would eye him and say, “He looks so fabulous, I wish he could act.”
“Just sit him in a chair,” Wayne County chimed. “He wouldn’t have to do a thing.”
Robert was sleeping alone. I went to knock on his door and it was unlocked. I stood and watched him sleep, as I had when I first met him. He was still that same boy with his tousled shepherd’s hair. I sat on the bed and he awoke. He leaned on one elbow and smiled. “Want to get under the covers, China?” He began tickling me. We wrestled around and couldn’t stop laughing. Then he jumped up. “Let’s go to Coney Island,” he said. “We’ll get our picture taken again.”
We did all the things we liked. We wrote our names in the sand, went to Nathan’s, strolled through Astroland. We got our picture taken by the same old guy, and at Robert’s insistence I climbed aboard his stuffed pony.
We stayed until dusk and boarded the F train back. “We’re still us,” he said. He held my hand and I fell asleep on his shoulder on the subway home.
Sadly, the new picture of the two of us was lost, but the picture of myself astride the pony, alone and slightly defiant, remains.
Robert sat on an orange crate as I read him some of my new poems.
“You should let people hear you,” he said, as he always did.
“You’re hearing me. That’s enough for me.”
“I want everyone to hear you.”
“No, you want me to read at one of those wretched teas.”
But Robert, not to be denied, pressed me, and when Gerard Malanga told him about a Tuesday open mike moderated by the poet Jim Carroll, he made me promise I would read.
I agreed to try, choosing a couple of poems I thought suitable to perform. I can’t remember what I read, but I certainly remember what Robert wore, a pair of gold lamé chaps he had designed. We had some discussion about the matching codpiece and decided against it. It was Bastille Day, and I jokingly predicted that heads would roll when those poets checked him out.
I instantly took a liking to Jim Carroll. He seemed a beautiful person, slim and sturdy with long red-gold hair, black Converse high-top sneakers, and a sweet disposition. I saw in him a mix of Arthur Rimbaud and Parsifal, the holy fool.
My writing was shifting from the formality of French