The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (45 page)

I found myself going to the ballet, to cocktail parties, “coming over for drinks,” to multiple gallery openings with Frank O'Hara and his shy but likable “roommate,” Joe LeSeur, who looked like a blond movie star of the ingenue type. With Frank O'Hara, one spun and darted through the New York art scene, meeting Balanchine or Merce Cunningham or John Cage or de Kooning or Larry Rivers. Frank, A.G., and I even had a few notable readings together at the old Living Theater, when it was on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. Another at Princeton with Diane DiPrima. I had taken the day off to do the Princeton set, calling in sick. But when I came in the next day my picture, plus A.G.'s, Frank's, and Diane's was in the
Daily News
or
Mirror
, so that vice president peeped it and let me know it. Just before lunchtime he comes through and drops the paper on my desk. “Sick, huh?” was all he said and turned on his heel. But I didn't get fired. That job did get a trifle complicated because the president's daughter, a young woman my own age, was trying to become a dancer and working part time at the family business and living down on Thompson Street, near where Dolly lived. We hit it off and started lunching together occasionally and standing around being in the office. There was no romance (not that I would have minded) but our friendly comrades-in-the-arts manner ticked off a few of the science majors and the vice president's eyes began burning holes in my back.

My standard hangout was the Cedar Tavern. Jazz at the Wagon, a joint down on Sullivan and Bleecker, had opened with the music, and cokes, but that was doomed. But I met Leroy McLucas, the photographer, who was manager of the joint while it lasted. The Five Spot was on the rise and in the third issue of
Zazen
we had a Five Spot ad: “Home of Thelonious Monk — Home of Jazz-Poetry — Home of America's Leading Painters, Sculptors, Composers, Actors, Poets, PEOPLE.” They had jazz and poetry every Monday night at 9:30. The Terminis who ran the joint, Iggy, the quiet one,
and Joe, the big extrovert, were two of the nicest guys in the business. It was a real drag when they got out.

I had gotten a small offset press and was now trying to do the magazine on it but failing, though a little guy named Chuck Irving ran some of the magazine for me and some other things. I managed to do a couple of small-run pamphlets. We decided to put out books, to start a small publishing operation, which I called, for some reason (maybe I was reading Jung at the time), Totem Press. I met Lucia DiBella through Ginsberg. She lived over on East Houston Street, pregnant with her first child. The guy who fathered the baby she would constantly make reference to as a square. I'd gone to see her to get work for
Zazen
and she gave us a couple short stories and some poetry.

Lucia was an ultra-Poundian when I first met her, with as much communications-for-poetry energy as A.G., but being a woman, and a pregnant one at that, she was more restricted. Lucia was toying at the time with the gay scene, and the black poet Audre Lorde was an old friend. But even as she talked theoretically about the gay life, she was always relating to one man (even some gay ones) or the other in some aggressive redhaired way. Later, we became lovers and still later coeditors of another publication,
The Fleeting Bear
.

Lucia was publishing her first book,
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward
. She sent it to Ferlinghetti and he sent a weak little “caveat emptor” as an introduction. We included this in our Totem series. Ron Loewinsohn's
Watermelons
, with introductions by William Carlos Williams and A.G., was the second of our publications. This was 1959, the civil rights movement was rising with every headline, and for the last few months I had been fascinated by the headlines from Cuba. I had been raised on Errol Flynn's
Robin Hood
and the endless hero-actors fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyrants. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.

So I proposed that we come out with a little pamphlet in honor of Fidel Castro, when the
barbudos
finally burst into Havana and sent Batista flying. Fee Dawson suggested we call the quick little pamphlets “blue plates,” as in the great American blue-plate special. Fee was a great one for Americana. He was the All American Boy gone haywire and turned to adultery, sly panhandling, and drink.

The reactions to my proposal were interesting. Sorrentino, always the classic debunker of the political in favor of the high aesthetic, said, “I hate guys in uniforms.” Alas, he should have told it to Ezra Pound. But he gave
us a poem. I remember there was a rather sharp discussion during our weekend bashes of my poem in that “blue plate” where it ends up saying, “Sunday mornings, after we have won.” The general line being that poets and politics ain't cohabiting. That was my line, had been the words coming out of my mouth. Yet perhaps the intensification of the civil rights movement, the daily atrocities which fat sheriffs in Dumbbell, Georgia, could run on blacks, began to piss me off much more deeply than I thought. I rejected Martin Luther King's philosophy. I was not nonviolent. I had written a poem about this time that ended:

We have awaited the coming of a natural
phenomenon. Mystics and romantics, knowledgeable
workers
of the land.
But none has come.
(Repeat)
But none has come.
Will the machine gunners please step forward
?

I was not entirely sure what it meant myself. But I knew I rejected King's tactics. I would not get beat in my head. I would fight, but what was I doing? The poem had asked earlier:

What
industry do I practice? A slick
colored boy, 12 miles from his
home. I practice no industry.
I am no longer a credit
to my race. I read a little,
scratch against silence slow spring
afternoons
.

The title of the poem was “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand.”

The static over the poem and the whole “blue plate” did crystallize some things. It made me see certain real differences among those of us in our little circle on West 20th Street. Differences which often registered anonymously in my head, registered near where the brown consciousness
still existed, tied to a black soul base. I had wandered away only so far, though. I came to a Halloween party we gave at West 20th Street as a “shade,” with an old window shade around my neck and hanging down my back like a cape. A.B. and I were the only bloods. I still pronounced the brownness but saw how caught it was in the ironies of that context, a comic manqué of Halloween identity.

The morality of the place, of that crowd and personal stance. There was not much black I related to except deep within myself, however that was stirred. It was not, ever, that I consciously desired not to be black or the brown consciousness tied irrevocably to the black mass soul — I had just wandered off, had gotten isolated to the extent that almost all of my closest friends, the people I saw everyday, were white!

But none of that really registered as such. In the wildness of our groping lives there was a deadly hedonism that answered all questions. That offered all explanations. The pleasure principle, that finally was the absolute, what gave pleasure, and that alone. Our lives were designed (to the extent they could arrange themselves according to our love of spontaneity) around pleasure. “Anything goes” was the word. Like Raskolnikov's line, “All is permitted.” The same stance.

Flashes of what that was, a rush of sparks, kicks, comings, lies, sadistic exchanges, masochism, a swarm of individuals sucking on life for instant gratification. It didn't matter how. With the cover story of Art to provide an arrogance and sense of superiority for some finally low shit.

As part of the social circle at West 20th Street people blew into town announced or unannounced. Poet John Wieners, just out of some institution, came and stayed with us a few weeks. He was wearing a long ponytail before they were even in with the outs. I walked him around the Village, going to the Eighth Street Bookstore, with people's heads turning, staring at John, who said maybe two words the whole time he stayed with us. John, like the rest of the younger poets, had picked a piece from this school and that. He liked Charles Olson's work. John, from Boston, called him Chawles. He had a crazy half-black (maybe Cape Verdian) friend, poet Steve Jonas, who plagued him. Jonas rambled nonstop about Pound. Blacks and Jews and Poundians all, scrambled by talk of Art. We'd look at all the “kikes” and “niggers” in his work, gloss it, look over it, justify it, and right on, Pound, right on!

Ray Bremser was another dude that showed, but this after much backand-forth correspondence between us. Bremser's weird rhythm and gnarled efflorescent style turned us on, plus his jailhouse humor. He and a young
black poet, Harold “Wine” Carrington, wrote us from the joint. Bremser made it out, Carrington didn't. Ray showed finally on West 20th Street and for a while I was his legal guardian. (In one publication on the Beats there are about ten poets whose address is c/o L. Jones, West 20th Street.)

Ray seemed determined to live out his own criminal projections as well as the myth of the Beats. Tall, hawk-billed, with the long slicked-down mop of the juvenile hoodlum, he was from Jersey City (no wonder!), but I liked the guy. He was wild but good-hearted and no punk (old usage).

One night Joel Oppenheimer comes into West 20th, blood everywhere. Some guy at the Cedar had bashed him. I pick up my iron pipe and say, “Let's go!” That surely was the black connection; the response to that kind of personal aggression is “Fight!” But Joel didn't want to go near a couple of those assembled, i.e., for help, not that we needed them. There were always some shoot-outs at the old Cedar. One night Sorrentino and I are standing in there swapping literary unniceties and in come these guys in grey flannel suits, sleek with ties, and for the hell of it they start some asinine conversations as to who we are, are we artists or what do we do, are we bohemians? In fact, whatever we're talking about this one slob wants to connect on. The conversation went from bad to worse. With these guys finally waving the flag or something and I raised Little Rock and one guy says, “You're just saying that because you're colored.” Which was true or could have been — but then, no, there's whites who would've objected to Orval Faubus. Gil would've, as unpolitical as he was. So I spit in this guy's face. But I got to hand it to the guy, he was all class. I say, “So what do you think of that?” The spit is literally hanging off his starched and stiff puss. I say, “Spit is dripping down your face.”

He says, “No, it's not.” Goddam. Now tell me that's not the height of absolute subjectivism. That's how these people can torture, kill, and oppress people. “No, it's not,” he says, with my nasty saliva rolling down his cheek.

Big John, the bartender, who was always grumpy in his good-natured way, comes over and looks at these two solid citizens and says, “What are you guys, starting trouble?”

I was beginning to see Lucia DiBella every so often. She'd resisted that liaison, protesting about Nellie. But finally it went down. Lucia was an arch-bohemian, the writer (person) on the fringe of society, par excellence. She liked that projection and held up the continental models of Cocteau and that crowd as historic disrupters of manners. And she was first and most deeply a literary person, a creature after and of the Arts. Always in
jeans, her long red hair twisted almost any kind of way, so little she thought of that kind of style. Nellie was a much more “middle-class” person. She could be the homemaker, the wife, though she was a great help with the magazine. Lucia and Nellie were clearly in contrast. But in that life of hedonism, all that finally matters is the pleasure one gets from something or someone, little else, everything else recedes into the background.

But one night I'm in Lucia's house and I pop awake and it's maybe two in the morning. I sit up and say, “Wow, I've got to get out of here, get home.”

Lucia, I guess not wanting me to leave then but at the same time letting me in on something that she thought would transform our relationship, looks at me and says in a soft but signifying voice, “Suppose I told you you didn't have to go back now, that Nellie is not there?”

“What?” I sat straight up. “What?” Ah, the injuries of spirit the male chauvinist must endure, doing his thing, but certainly in no way ready for the woman to do hers. I threw on my clothes. Lucia is protesting, “Why are you goin' now? She's not even there.”

But I was on the street in a few minutes, sprinting almost all the way from Avenue C and Houston to West 20th Street and 9th Avenue. When I got in the house, it was true, Nellie was not there. A.B. is on the couch sleeping. I prod him awake. “Where's Nellie?” I shouted. He shook his head, shaking off sleep. “Where's Nellie?” I shouted again, right close to his face. And then it hit me. Every week Nellie had gone out with Celento's wife, they were going to “dance class” and then they'd go have a drink at the Cedar, the girls hanging out. The notorious Ceeny was seeing CD and one night I'd walked in and Nelly's sitting with her talking to a painter, Luke Sashimi, a Japanese. It didn't make any difference at the time, but now it did. I said to A.B., “Sashimi? Is she at Sashimi's?” He nodded yes.

I knew where Luke Sashimi lived because it had been pointed out to me before. He was a friend of Frank O'Hara's, an abstract expressionist of the Kline school. I ran over to his loft, which was only a few blocks away, shot up the stairs, and began hammering on the door. Sashimi opened the door and Nellie was sitting inside, on the side of the bed, as if she was waiting for me. All I said was, “Let's go. Come on.” She began to cry. Sashimi walked toward me and I stood with my fists balled up. But this bastard had offered once to teach me judo.

He said, “We civilized people. We civilized people.” I got Nellie's arm and pushed her out the door.