POPism (39 page)

Apparently, though, somebody got the Jimmy Smith treatment once too often, because late in '68 he was killed in a fall from the fifth story of a loft building downtown. They say somebody caught him breaking into their apartment and gave him a little push. It must have been somebody who knew him, too, because as everybody knew—“Jimmy only stole from his friends.” A lot of people had been in love with Jimmy, but a lot more were so sick of all the things he'd done to them that they were relieved when he died.

After he was dead, Brigid met someone who'd known him all his life who told her that, incredibly, Jimmy Smith was from a wealthy Jewish family on Riverside Drive and that every few months when he was totally exhausted from ripping people off, he'd go back home and for a few days his old nanny would literally put him to bed, tucking him in.

• • •

By the beginning of '68 a lot of people who'd been doing speed for years were cutting down—even some of the real diehard A-men were admitting that it had crossed their minds to quit. The Velvets' second album,
White Light/White Heat
, was about to be released that January, and one day Lou walked into the Factory and put an advance copy on the stereo.

With lyrics about amphetamine blasting around us, like, “Watch that speed freak / Watch that speed freak/If you're gonna blow him/Make it every week,” Lou told me that he was trying to stop, but that Ondine was making it hard. “I just about told Ondine, ‘I'm stopping,' and he showed up at my place with two ounces and said, ‘Oh, why don't you have some?' ” Lou now had a loft on Seventh Avenue and 28th Street. He was one of the very few actual residents in the fur business district, which was jammed in the daytime and absolutely deserted at night. “I bought a pool table last week at Korvettes on Herald Square,” he told me, “and Sterling and I carried it the six blocks to my place and then everybody spent hours trying to position match books under it. This marathon went on for days. When Max's closed, we'd go back and play records with all the amps up: there's only one other person living in a radius of four city blocks. Ironically, he lives on the floor above me. A fat nigger junkie. And when the music was on, he jumped up and down and the ceiling sagged and Ondine got very excited and then we danced in a circle. And then Ondine took the two ounces and emptied it out on the pool table. He was leaving and I vowed, ‘I will not take it.' He said, ‘Well, in
case
you change your mind.' Can you imagine?”

At the end of January we went out to Arizona to film
Lonesome Cowboys
. It was originally supposed to be a Romeo-Juliet type story called
Ramona and Julian
, but quickly got improvised into
a movie about a one-woman all-fag cowboy town. We had Eric there, and Louis Waldon and Taylor and Frankie Francine and Joe Dallesandro and Julian Burroughs, a kid we'd just met in New York who claimed he was William Burroughs's son, and Tom Hompertz, a nice-looking blond surfer we'd met the previous fall while we were making a lecture appearance in San Diego.

We gave everybody plane tickets to Tucson, but since a strange girl we knew called Vera Cruise happened to be driving out there anyway, we said that if they wanted they could cash in their tickets and keep the money and ride out with her, and that's what Eric did.

Vera always drove around in lots of different cars, very flashy Jaguars and other sports models, and she knew how to rip a whole car apart and assemble it back together. She was Puerto Rican, but her accent was just heavy New York/Brooklyn. Every year she went to Arizona for her health; she was always coughing from what she said was tuberculosis. She was such an odd sight to see—under five feet with short, boyish dark hair and a sickly cough, in a black leather motorcycle jacket that she usually wore over a white nurse's uniform. Incredibly, she could rattle off the medical name for any disease. She said she'd taken premed courses once, and she had a job in a lab or something. (The next year she was arrested for car theft—it turned out she was picking up stolen cars at airports and delivering them. Everybody told me, “Oh, come on, don't play dumb—you knew Vera did that! My God, she even
told
you!” But when a person comes right out and tells you, “I steal cars,” the way Vera had, somehow you don't think they're serious.)

When we arrived in Tucson, Vera and Eric—and John Chamberlain, the sculptor, who'd ridden out with them—were already
there. They met us at the airport with a rented touring bus that could hold about eighteen people. We all piled in and Vera started driving, fast and bumpy over the highway.

“She loves to drive, doesn't she?” Eric commented, bracing himself. “It was like this the whole way down here—she's
crazy.”
All of a sudden, she veered the bus off the main road and we were cutting across the desert, right through cactus, under bare stars. As the bus rattled, I kept thinking, “What if it breaks down? No one will ever find us
here.”

Suddenly there was this thud like something had hit the bus. Vera put on the brakes and got out to see what it was. She came back with a big dead eagle, the symbolic kind you're not supposed to kill.

“He attacked the bus,” she said, incredulous. “He flew right at it like he was going to lift it up and take it back to his nest— at
night
!”

We finished the ride with the dead eagle in the bus. Later, Vera put it in a plastic garbage bag—“to stop the decay”—and brought it to a local taxidermist. The taxidermist notified the police, and the police held her till they could confirm that it really had been killed by impact with a moving vehicle and not murdered or anything. But they wouldn't give it back to her.

(Vera informed us that this was not the first time that a bird had gotten killed attacking her—she was once riding the back of a motorcycle with a cast on her forearm when a bird swooped down and smashed its head on the plaster.)

The dude ranch we stayed at in Tucson was run by an old man and his wife who were busy trying to sell it so they could retire into a mobile home and travel the country. They had lots of trophies
and mementos and pictures of stars like Dean Martin and John Wayne and stills from an O.K. Corral movie.

Someone insisted that the little movie city we'd rented to shoot in belonged to John Wayne—it was the kind of place that easily could have; a lot of famous westerns and TV shows had been shot there, and tourists paid money to come through and see stunt men crashing saloon chairs over each other “just like in the movies.”

It was misty the day we started shooting
Lonesome Cowboys
. The dialogue the boys were coming out with was going along the lines of “You dirty cocksucking motherfucker, what the hell is wrong with you?” and in the middle of this type of thing, we saw that they were bringing a bunch of tourists in, announcing, “You're about to see a movie in production….” Then the group of sightseers marched in to “You fags! You queers! I'll show you who's the real cowboy around here, goddamn it!” They started going nuts, rushing their kids away and everything.

Eventually, the grips, the electricians, and the people who build the sets formed a vigilante committee to run us out of town, just like in a real cowboy movie. We were all standing on the drugstore porch, except for Eric, who was doing his ballet exercises at the hitching post, when a group of them came over and said, “You perverted easterners, go back the hell where you came from.”

Viva told them, “Fuck you.”

For the rest of that day they monitored every move we made. The sheriff came in a helicopter and stood on top of the water tower with binoculars, watching to see if anybody took their clothes off. Pretty soon we just left, it got to be too much of a hassle to work there.

Louis was outraged: “I mean, what the hell—it's a
real
western, the way the West really
was.”
Louis played the oldest member of the gang, who had warm feelings and concern toward all the younger ones. “It's probably the most sensitive western ever made!”

But the professional movie cowboys didn't think so. Or maybe they did.

The night before we were leaving Arizona, nobody could find Eric anywhere. I discovered him myself, alone in an old Mexican adobe chapel in a big empty field with mountains all around.

He didn't hear me walk in, and I stood at the back of the chapel watching him. On the walls were hundreds of pictures of Indian boys—soldiers from around Tucson who'd died in Vietnam—and beside each picture was a little name card and a candle and each soldier's personal jewelry. Eric was standing in front of one of the cards. I went over to him and asked how long he'd been standing there, and he said, “There're so many.”

He'd been standing there for hours.

At the end of '67 we'd been notified that the Factory building on East 47th was going to be torn down in a few months, so we had to find a new space.

Paul Morrissey and Fred Hughes were the strongest influences on Factory life at this point, and they had very different ideas about what it should be like. I wasn't sure myself, so I'd make noncommittal little noises and gestures. Paul wanted the new place to have desks and spindles and filing cabinets and a weekly copy of
Variety
—to be a real office centered on film production and distribution. He wanted it to be a place that kids
wouldn't feel like hanging around—and if there was any place kids in the sixties didn't feel like hanging around, it was an office.

But Fred wanted the Factory to stay a place that was a mixture of art and business: “Listen,” he said to me, exasperated, “you're an
artist!
What do you want to do? Rent a room with a desk and a sign that says ‘Podunk Porno Movies?'”

Fred loved making movies as much as anyone, but he felt that I'd be doing more and more art again, too. I finally agreed with him that it would be a good idea to have lots of room—room for whatever we might decide to get involved with. Besides, if we got a loft, we'd be able to continue screening movies.

Even though I didn't know exactly what I wanted, I did know that I didn't want to confine myself to just movies—I wanted to do everything—and you can't grow horizontally in an office, whereas in a loft space you can. My style was always to spread out, anyway, rather than move up. To me, the ladder of success was much more sideways than vertical.

It was Paul who actually found the perfect loft. It was down at 33 Union Square West, the eleven-story Union Building across Union Square Park from S. Klein's. We took the whole sixth floor with a little balcony that looked out on the park. And Max's was only a block and a half away. Fred pointed out that the Union Building was mentioned in F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story “May Day,” and as a matter of fact, the Communist party still had their offices on the eighth floor. And when we went down to check the place out, we rode up in the elevator with Saul Steinberg, who told us that he rented the top floor.

Now that we'd decided on the loft, the next big controversy was over how it was going to be set up inside. Paul and Fred, of course, had different ideas about that, too—from the locks on
the door right up to the lighting fixtures. (Billy wasn't taking any interest at all in the move—he came down once, saw that there was a back area that he could set up in, and left, satisfied. And Gerard was out of the country with one of his rich patronesses who'd taken him traveling somewhere.) But the arguments died down the minute Paul noticed that the woodwork around the windows was painted white and needed stripping. One thing about Paul—if you could get him started stripping woodwork, he'd forget about everything else.

When I look back, I can see that the biggest fights at the Factory were
always
over decorating. In other areas everybody stuck to their own field of interest, everybody was easygoing, but when it came to how the place should
look
, everybody had ideas that they turned out to be willing to really fight for.

Fred was doing so much decorating that he nicknamed himself “Frederick of Union Square.”

I left the big open spaces to everybody else to section off however they wanted, and I moved into a small narrow office over on the side where I could clutter up and not get in anybody's way.

Paul would sometimes go over to Union Square in the mornings to strip wood before coming up to 47th Street. One morning when he was down at 33, a young kid delivered a Western Union telegram there, at just about the time Paul was realizing that there were just too many painted wood surfaces for one person to do alone. When he noticed that the messenger was well mannered, he started up a conversation and found out his name was Jed Johnson, that he had just arrived in New York from Sacramento, and that he and his twin brother, Jay, were
living right across the park in a fifth-floor walk-up on 17th Street. Paul hired him to help get the place in shape.

It wasn't till we got back from Arizona that we made the actual move downtown. In the course of it, we lost the big curved couch that was so much a part of the old Factory. We left it on the street for only a few seconds, but somebody scurried out of somewhere and walked off with it. Then Fred realized that a big oak desk painted silver that he liked a lot had gotten left behind and he rushed back uptown for it. He was so determined to take it with him that he roped the thing onto dollies—it was mammoth, about six feet by three—and wheeled it the thirty-plus blocks down Second Avenue, right through the Midtown Tunnel traffic, all by himself. (There was a sanitation workers' strike going on at the time and garbage was flowing out of every alleyway, fifty thousand tons of it, according to the papers.) We were all big furniture freaks, really—we couldn't stand to lose a good piece—but Fred deserved a medal for that feat.

Everyone could sort of sense that the move downtown was more than just a change of place—for one thing, the Silver Period was definitely over, we were into white now. Also, the new Factory was definitely not a place where the old insanity could go on. Even though the “screening room” had couches and a stereo and a TV and was clearly for lounging around, the big desks up front as you came in off the elevator gave people the hint that there was something going on in the way of business, that it wasn't all just hanging around anymore. We spent more time than ever at Max's, since it was so close and since Mickey still gave us credit for art. It was like an answering service for us—say we wanted to get in touch with a certain superstar, we'd
just leave a message at Max's for them to call the Factory or else just put out the word in the back room.