There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 07

Date: About 1961 to 1965

There's a Cow in Manhattan

Part Seven

George Monk came to Manhattan. He was studying acting at Carnegie Tech and had visited me once before at my Avenue B apartment. We decided that as soon as he was through with his schooling we would find a loft together. George Monk moved into my apartment, he had quit his schooling and was ready to find the loft with me and begin working as an actor in Manhattan. This was in September.

I continued working at my mail delivery job at the Metropolitan, but each moment I had I looked for lofts, either by telephoning or walking around during lunch hour. George was doing the same thing and it got to be such a habit that we both were looking up at windows to see if they were vacant for months after we found the loft. George found it. I don't know how, but I think it was listed in the Village Voice. George was an adopted son of an Army officer and had lived in China. He had been to Europe for a summer. It was a high school graduation present. I met George in the Army, in Heidelberg, Germany. He was stationed there too. His father was a retired officer by that time. I had forgot to mention George, because I had forgot all about him until now. That's the way it happened then too. I wasn't thinking of a loft anymore, I had all I wanted now and was painting some new ideas I had just come upon. Mary Alice O'Neal had returned from her trip and was not pregnant and I didn't know what to do when suddenly George Monk was there.

George's sister Diana lived in Brooklyn with her husband. She was adopted too. It was so strange that they were brother and sister by adoption and not related at all but most certainly looked alike. They looked like the Monks. I always thought Monk was a very good name for an actor. I always thought George Monk a good actor too. The main reason was that he never acted in real life, then when he acted for an audience he turned into somebody else. Naturally I saw all the things he did and although some were not good, he was as good as the production could allow. George's sister and her husband moved us one day with their car and a U-Haul trailer and that's how I got here to 65 Fulton Street.

I told Mr. Kramer, my landlord on Avenue B that I was going to move. He told me I couldn't, that I had a lease that lasted another two years. I told him I was going to move anyway. He and I did not get angry, I just would not believe him. He said he would have to call in the rental commission and I thought that was alright. I would just explain I was moving to a loft. The next day Mr. Kramer knocked at my door and said it was alright if I moved, but I would not get my deposit returned, but I know that deposit meant nothing in renting in Manhattan, it's just a double rent charge at the beginning of a lease.  The telephone company loves to return a deposit, so does Con Edison.

Moving, naturally, took all day. I hadn't quite expected the loft to be so dirty and dark. No electricity turned on, and the loft hadn't been occupied in six years. We just stacked everything wherever we could. The great thrill was opening the big iron shutters that were on the outside of the windows in the back part of the building. There was a shaftway and a hoist that could be pulled by hand and although it was very hard work, it was more sensible than carrying everything up four flights of skinny stairs. I have my paintings all stacked by the trap door of the hoist now. It makes a nice storage room and the door is made of the same wood as part of the wall, so it's a secret storage and I like that because I love hiding the paintings I'm not showing on purpose.

I don't know how long this loft is. It's twenty feet wide and the ceiling is sixteen feet high at the back and gets lower as it goes to the front. I think at the front it is nine feet high. The front looks out on Fulton Street, and the back, after the shutters are open, looks out on a roof that is two floors below, then another building has its back facing me. I don't know what they do in that building, but the windows are clean all the time. The top floor is printing papers and as far as I can see the next floor below is stamping out inner soles for shoes. My bed is between the two main windows back here. There is another window to my right, as I sit here on the bed leaning against the wall. The other window is a door leading to the fire escape down to the roof, two floors below me. When I go down there, I pass what came to be Lee Guilliatt's and Jean Rigg's loft that is on the floor below me.

After we got moved that Sunday, George Monk and I had a few drinks in the bar on the street floor of this building. I don't know why the bar is open on Sunday, but it is sometimes. There is nobody around here on Sunday. After the drinks we took a nap and woke up in pitch darkness. I had my clothes for work stored at Lee Guilliatt's. We were going to spend the night at her place on Suffolk, then I could go to work the next day while George began putting the loft in order.

Ginnie McManus was looking very nice in those days. She always wore well-made suits and her hair was not long, but blond and always well groomed. Ginnie was one of those blonds that had fuzz on her face that showed up even if she wore makeup. It always seemed to mat ever so slightly and Ginnie's makeup was a bit more oily than expected, so her fuzz could be seen glistening and her eye lashes were light no matter how she tried putting color on them. Later, when her book came out, there was a photograph of her on the back of the dust jacket and she looked like a blond Rosalind Russell. She and I got along well enough. She loved hearing my mocking Sarah Vaughan, but we never really confided in one another like I was confiding in Lee Guilliatt.

By now Lee and Ginnie were hardly speaking. They had met through strange circumstances, and Ginnie who had some money coming in was paying the bills and keeping very quiet there in the Suffolk Street apartment. Ginnie and George got on with one another very well, they had some kind of professional consciousness that I always thought very suspicious. It was nothing like Lee and my Midwestern attitude. Now I see the difference and although I see I'll always have the same attitude I grew up with, I will get smoother. Lee always worked very hard on not getting smoother, she thought it was insincere, but she is from Nebraska and there is the difference between Nebraska and Indiana. Lee disliked George Monk on sight. It didn't come as a surprise, but I was surprised at how hard she worked on such expected attitudes. She had been staying with me at Avenue B after Tracy had vanished and we had got much closer. It was a shock for both of us when George moved in, because we were thinking of getting a place together. We hadn't said it out but both of us could see we were destined to live together. She had every right to dislike George. Lee had nobody to be close with except me, and I had moved that day far downtown out of our neighborhood and Lee was terribly alone.

That night Lee went through a very strange seizure. She and Ginnie were sleeping in the bedroom and George and I were on a blanket in the living room. Ginnie rushed into where we were sleeping, turned on the light and said that Lee had gone crazy. With the exhaust of having moved, and the anticipation of rerouting all my identification to a new residence, being awoken to such a strange story made me shudder. I felt the way I felt one morning in the Army when I was on bivouac, sleeping in a tent, when whistles were blown at five o'clock in the morning and all kinds of sergeants were shouting that we were going on a fifteen-mile forced march. Ginnie asked me to talk to Lee, then explained that perhaps Lee had some kind of contagious brain fever. I went into the room where Lee was and tried to tell her who I was. She was sitting in the far corner of the bed with her arms clamped around her knees mumbling all sorts of phrases that no one could understand. I told her who I was and tried to ask her to relax. I could see Lee's situation was half real and half forced. I thought of hitting her very hard and telling her to come out of it. I knew if I could make her cry, she would melt into a puddle and I could get some sleep. This was Nebraska facing Indiana and something said I should see what was going on. I saw what I already knew, that Lee was doing her Lee things, but I saw it more clearly, I saw that her life was all she had. I had never seen anything like that before. My life was all I had too, but I had so much security, which I had made up and really believed. Lee didn't have any security and didn't want any. She had no job anymore. Ginnie was paying her rent, I had moved to another section of Manhattan and Lee was demonstrating her situation just like she knew how and that's the only way she could do it. I'm so glad now I didn't hit her, I would have had to marry her then. I kept talking and suggested she lie down, close her eyes and try to sleep. The next morning I awoke holding her. She was asleep and remained asleep till after I left. Ginnie moved out after that and when I talked to Lee about it, she didn't remember it. I began understanding Lee a bit. I knew that even if she did remember it, she didn't. She lived her life by the moment. Does this happen in America the farther west one goes. It sounded very California to me.

This was my last week of mail route. I had found another position. I was to be the secretary to the Display Department. I was going to wear a tie to work after this week. When I got to work Miss Mason told me I had a long distance phone call from Indiana. I knew what it was. I knew my Dad had died. I telephoned to the operator and got Aunt Renie right away. She told me Dad had died. They tried to call me, but there was no answer even late into the night. I told her I had moved and it sounded so funny from here going to there. Telephones can't take care of that kind of time. I couldn't tell Aunt Renie what a night I had, how exhausted I was -- nothing.  All I could tell her was to hold in until I got home. Miss Mason was my department boss. She was Southern, and on the heavy side and about fifty years old. There are times in everyone's life for Miss Mason. Naturally she heard the telephone call and knew the situation. In her clear southern accent she asked me if I had enough money to fly home. I said I did, but she handed me a hundred dollars and said, "good, you can pay this back when you return." Miss Mason always had us give her a bit of money each time we got paid. She explained that when we changed jobs we would get it all back. However, while we were in her office we had to pay into the emergency fee, just in case anyone needed emergency money. I went to Verdalee's office and told her. She too was consoling and gave me two little pills. She said, "You are in New York and that is far away from your father's funeral. Right before you get home, take one of these pills, then take another before the funeral, they will keep you together." They worked too. I didn't break down until I saw the Ellerman boys at the funeral home.

Aunt Renie had the same expression on her face that Lee Guilliatt had the night I moved. They were both looking at me with remainders of life in their hands. The house Dad and Aunt Renie had been living in was so beautiful. Dad finally realized that he had retired from farming and spent all of his time keeping up the house. It was a wooden clapboard house all painted white with green shutters sitting kitty-cornered in a corner lot. Half was rented to an old lady named Mrs. Long, and she had her own private entrance. It was known as a double house. No one whom I knew was going to live in either part of the house anymore. Aunt Renie already knew she was going to move in with Aunt Stell and already I could see she did not fit in that double house anymore.

When someone dies in a family everyone in the family loses some identification in their own system. Selma looked stern, Aunt Stell looked older, and Aunt Renie looked like she had been caught in the rain. Her two sons were there. Bud was available at all times, and Fr. Hilary spent three days in Vincennes. Dad had been to Selma's playing with her two girls, Laura and Sara. Jean, the next daughter was a tiny baby. Dad had been sitting in the living room and called for Selma to come up from the basement where she was doing the laundry. Selma does a complete laundry every day. She's that type, she's a nurse. Dad said he was having trouble breathing. Selma called for the ambulance when she saw Dad was turning blue. She knew it was his heart and he died the next day in the hospital.

Death is never expected even if it is expected. That is something I will not understand until I'm old. Even though Dad had had a heart attack it did not mean he was going to die. Then, after he had died everyone knew he was going to die after having a heart attack. But, this was only a way of getting around to accepting he was dead. No one changed because of his death except Aunt Renie. She changed houses and complete identity now that she began living with a sister instead of a brother, which could be more of a change than any other. Dad was a wonderful George and he was brown like Georges are brown, but his personality had black trim. If he left crumbs from where he had been they were always black crumbs like his eyebrows. His wrinkles were black because they were the only parts of him that hadn't stood in the blazing sun for so many years. He was short and stout and as he grew older he got shorter. Even his teeth got shorter and his mouth got wider and thinner. He was stretching from side to side and it was an appreciated way to grow when one levels off.

Once I had only hate and cold chills about funerals and death in Indiana. I did even at Dad's funeral, but now it doesn't make any difference. I'm not going to attempt rearranging the tradition anymore. When Mom died the wake was held right in the house on the farm. The undertaker company installed a generator behind the house that made an electric current for the coffin lights, and as I lay in bed as a child, I thought the pulse of the generator had something to do with death because the time my twin brother died, there was that same sound. Dad was taken to a funeral home, not far from the house where he and Aunt Renie had been living and it was handled so well. The little responsibility I had was all taken care of but the strange part was the shifts we had to take standing by the casket receiving handshakes and tear-stained faces from all sorts of people. Selma and I were on a shift together and she always told me who the next person was that was coming up. It was interesting until the Ellermans came up and they represented all my farm days with Dad, and it made me realize my Dad was dead.

On the day of the funeral I walked into the funeral home and there stood Florence and Rosemary. They had driven all night from Georgia and I was very touched and could not talk to them without crying. The funeral was not memorable, I don't know how one could be, but suddenly everything was over and I did feel as though I had been to church. We went back to the house and Aunt Hootie and Buck were there. Everybody in the neighborhood had brought food. Fr. Hilary, Bud and his wife Agnes, Selma and her husband Bill and Aunt Stell and Aunt Renie were there and most of us took a drink of whiskey and suddenly even the air around us was different and we all began to talk louder until we were talking very loud and then we began to laugh and sometimes we would cry a little, because Deem laughter is close to crying and we all began to have a good time and we all have had a very good time since Dad died and I think that is a very good sign. We all certainly had a very good time while Dad was alive too. He was sixty-two.  

I stayed at home for another week and began cleaning out the basement and trying to find a place for my old paintings that I had stored there. Selma took them and put them in her attic. She later sold them by displaying them at the hospital. The biggest one sold for twenty-five dollars and I told her to keep the money for her efforts. Mr. and Mrs. Catt moved into the house after I returned to Manhattan and I had a terrible time remembering to write to Aunt Renie without putting Dad's greeting first. Once in a while I would forget Aunt Stell's home address when making out the envelope. The address is 506 South Third Street. I remember when I was in grade school and in English class when we were taught to write letters, I always used 506 South 3rd Street, it was the only city address I knew, and it always looked so important. It is a little four-roomed wooden cottage very near the south end of town. When I learned to drive my first trip was that far. All the Deems from their farms met there on Saturday afternoon to wait for the rest of the family or just to visit Grandma Deem when she was still alive. Now Aunt Stell lived there alone. She had taken in boarders during the war, usually telephone operators or a Deem girl who was finished being on the farm and old enough and pretty enough to live in town and work a job and have a little career before their marriage. It is so natural now that Aunt Renie lives there and the young children all think Aunt Renie and Aunt Stell were always there.

At first they both looked a bit frazzled, like they were doing spring cleaning, even when I visited there that Christmas. Aunt Stell sat on the side of the television reading while Aunt Renie and I watched Red Skelton or Carol Burnett. When something happened that caused a reaction for us, Aunt Stell rocked forward and looked into the picture and smiled, asking what happened. If Aunt Renie left the room, Aunt Stell would look at me and mouth "I just don't like television," but no sound would come out. Aunt Stell worked for an optometrist in those days and Aunt Renie and I loved watching quiz programs in the afternoon. She and Aunt Florence are the best people to watch television with, they are charmed with everything that happens, even the ads. It's all a great big gift for them. I tried watching Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton here in Manhattan when I got my TV but can't understand them without Aunt Renie. One day she told me that she thought like the rest of the family that surely Stell was a saint, but, "do you know it is hell living with a saint."

Dad died in October and when I got back to New York, to the loft, summer was over and it was so cold there that water froze in containers near the window. I was always afraid that the skin on my feet would stick to the floor when I got out of bed. George Monk had hollowed out a great island for living in in the middle of the loft and a very decent life began for both of us there. Mary Alice O'Neal became charmed with the loft the day I put up my easel on the Fulton Street end of the loft and she began running from one end to the other, smiling. I began to paint horizontal lines.

Mary Anthony, Mary Anthony, Mary Anthony. My mind keeps repeating Mary Anthony. Once my mind repeated "there'll be no sad songs for me." I would think of that when I woke up. This happened while I was living on Avenue B. The next words I kept thinking were Mary Anthony, and this was on Avenue B too. I met Jenny Lou in the Village and she had been crying and I made her tell me why. She had started going to modern dance classes and felt so stupid and was going to quit. I made her promise to stay on until the next class and I would join her. She was very pleased and I met her on Thursday and went to my first modern dance class that I had taken in Manhattan. The class was taught by Mary Anthony.

Mary Anthony was nothing like Verdalee, whom I admired so much. She was the first completely professional person I had ever seen. She lived in the back of her studio and would not appear until the class began, then she would swiftly walk into the middle of the room in a long black skirt and sit on an old round screw-top piano stool and class would quietly begin. At first it was only training in how to learn to be comfortable in the most uncomfortable positions anyone could design, and I could see in Mary Anthony's face an intelligence that was saying to me, "That's it, whatever you are thinking, keep doing it because you are learning something." I never had any trouble stretching nor holding any challenge of strength. She even told me I was too limber, but I had such a terrible time connecting one movement to another. It is like learning a language and knowing you must review all the rules you've learned at an instant in order to utter any group of words because they must all associate with themselves or you are not understanding the language in any way. I went twice a week. I carried my dance clothes in a briefcase to the Museum. It looked like I was a real businessman and it always thrilled me that the briefcase had black tights in it. We did all our classes barefoot and that suited me. I've always gone barefoot, but I somehow wanted to have a reason to own ballet shoes, they looked so good and surely felt so good on feet.

It's always been a problem to explain even to myself how an artist could also be so interested in dance that they actually become a dancer. I always told everyone who asked, that they were very closely related and no one ever asked me what I meant. They always said they guessed it was true. Now I'm beginning to figure it out. While painting or drawing the artist has a plot going with himself and the piece he is working on. He never needs to remember it because it isn't the reason to work. Even if he returns to work more there is no need to conjure a new plot nor the old one, it comes and there it is every time. It never comes because the artist calls on it, it just is there. I found this out when I was first doing watercolors by myself on the farm in Indiana. Years after I had completed them I've looked at them and have been able to remember what I was wearing and what state of mind I was in, even the time of year when the painting had nothing to do with landscape. Now I am able to look at work I recently am involved with and I can remember what music I had been listening to. For a long time I listened to WQXR because I got it so clearly and it also played music I was interested in. Finally I got tired of excerpts and found WRVR, which plays entire works. Now I'm not so interested in symphonic works and listen to WABC and Big Dan Ingram and his popular music. I got on to that when I began hearing the sad thin songs of Leslie Gore and finding such a pleasure in realizing how synthetic the songs were, and it gave me so much time to see and become involved with the plots that came to me from my work. Of course now I don't listen to the radio at all, I don't talk to myself anymore, I go deeply into my plots. Some are real stories of red hating to be associated with other colors, or forms that have strange complaints about being forced into certain areas. Surely Miro would understand what I'm talking about, his work has nothing else but this type of plot. In dance, Mary Anthony often gave images for the student to use so that the abstract movement had some kind of code to remember. This was important when I began, just like the radio was once when I painted. Now the images given by a dance teacher are not heard by me as much as they were at the beginning. Now each combination of movement has its own plot inside me. They are not necessarily connected with the movement. Sometimes a flexed foot reminds me of stepping on snow barefoot. I always go on the roof barefoot when it first snows in Manhattan, and walk in it until my feet get cold. A swing of the arm to a held position can bring a memory of shaking out rugs, which I remember doing at the monastery, for some reason. It doesn't matter if the plot is a past experience or an abstract situation, and it doesn't matter if when I repeat the dance combination I don't evoke the same plot. It only matters that I am controlled enough within myself to be able to have a plot because it lets me know that I know what I'm doing. Everyone should have a chance to do something that lets a plot come in. Most people do, or we would not notice so many people every day walking and talking and working in a way that shows they know what they are doing because they are able to act the part and they are that part.

I first listened to WNEW when I got to Manhattan. I wanted to hear the jingle: Music played only for you, on WNEW in New York. It was that that told me I was in New York. For a while I listened to WNYC in the morning, while getting ready to go to work. "East Side, West Side" was played at the beginning of the program, then all kinds of events were listed. I think it was titled, "Around New York."

The whole idea is what is a picture. By now it is simple and entertaining to think of pictures. The first picture that comes to my mind is a label for tinned food that we got at home. It was Fort Sackville and there was a picture of a log fort. It was in color and it was rectangular with the composition using the longest side to hold the picture. If I held the label so that the longest side was vertical, I couldn't read the picture the way it was made to read. This is how I got to my horizontal lines. It was all white and the horizontal lines were really strips of paint. It looked like a piece of lined writing paper. I framed a piece of lined writing paper and called it Composition.

Benny Andrews looks like an artist, and I knew him before he had his beard. He used to smoke cigarettes too. He looks like an artist, just like the artists in the Village do, but there is something that lets you know that he isn't an artist in the Village and that something is Benny Andrews. I once was talking to him about the silliness of Tommy Johnson saying he was really named Tommy, even on his birth certificate. I told Benny that no one would write Tommy on a birth certificate, it would be Thomas and it is silly that anyone should name their child a nickname that means a proper name. Benny told me that his real name was Benny, and it's true. Benny Andrews. He worked very hard doing illustrations for Saturday Review, and they were published and he got some money for them, and he quit having any interest in commercial art. He was just painting. He stayed on at the Metropolitan Museum for a long time, and we saw a great deal of one another.

Most offices at the Metropolitan Museum have steps right at the door that either go up or lead you down. In my new office, there were concrete steps that one had to ascend to get into the office. In the Medieval offices one must step down two steps. They even have yellow lines painted on them to warn people. Yellow is a color for caution and it certainly works and it certainly is a color for caution. Biddy Bordenstein's office has one step down at the entrance. She works for Mr. Wilkinson. It's the Near East or Far East. I never remember since I realized the Far East is really nearer than the Near East. One walks on a straight floor to Mr. Rorimer's office and there is one step down to go to the Curator of European Painting. The offices for the American Wing have nothing to do with the Museum. They are near the main delivery entrance and though they are comfortable looking, they must be cold during the winter, plus very noisy. Henry Geldzahler was a new Assistant Curator of American Art. He is the assistant to Robert Beverly Hale, who is blind. I don't know what Albert Ten Eyck Gardner really does, but he's there too. Mr. Biddle is involved with the decorative arts in the American Wing. It is so Metropolitan Museum to call the American Wing the American Wing. It makes it all seem that it was donated by a bird, which it may have been. They could call the Egyptian Department the Egyptian Wing, but the Museum is much too bright for that. I always liked the Costume Institute. It isn't an institute any more than the American Wing is a wing, but there it is and it's very lovely there, but the Curator there is very unreasonable and talks while you talk. Mr. Knotts, who was my boss in the Display Department called her a professional refugee. Her name is Polaire Weissman.

My new job was splendid, just like my teeth. Whenever Selma and I went to a dentist, the dentist always said, "Splendid." I still write this to Selma and it still happens. My job was just like the feeling I always got after having seen the dentist. I had a desk that faced the steps and I watched everyone fall up them. Mr. Knotts' drawing board was behind me with his desk. He was seldom there. There were three other men in the room who designed posters, did a lot of lettering for labels and one taught me how to apply gold leaf. I received all label changes and the entire Museum was reprinting all their labels on plastic with some kind of process I don't understand. It's not understandable. But I had to take all the label changes to Miss Mason, where I used to work and have Florence Gordon design them on a special typewriter. That was most of my job, except answering the telephone. When there were no labels nor any telephone calls, I learned to prop myself over a book and sleep while chewing gum. I thought it worked, but think the other men could see I was sleeping, it didn't make any difference. I was painting each night until late and was very tired at the Museum. Dance classes don't make you tired, they wake you up and make you feel ambitious, then you get tired after painting late into the night. Lee Guilliatt was doing her things at her apartment on Suffolk Street. I visited her at times and we would visit Benny and Mary Ellen who still lived in the same building. Benny, Lee and I were all artists and decided we had to have an exhibition somewhere. We had tried showing at the Washington Square Art Show, but that led to nothing. Benny did get some attention from a man named Stanley Cranston who owned a gallery called the Fulton Gallery. I was surprised to find it was almost next door to my loft here on Fulton. Benny's connection with the Fulton Gallery didn't last very long. Lee sold some work there, I showed one piece, but took it away after a few weeks. It is never possible for me to wait for a sale, then have the sale come true. Lee can wait and hope for a sale to come through and it usually does and it always surprises me. She says that is the way her life goes, and she's right. When she doesn't have some thing to wait for, no matter how trivial she digs down under in her bed covers and just goes away from any communication. Suddenly I would see her again and any hint of depression or that look of having gone away into herself is all gone, and she has a new attitude for living and indeed her life is going very well suddenly. Our gallery plans were only dreams. It was going to be called the Thursday Gallery with openings on Thursday and that was as far as we took the dream.

A rectangle is more interesting than a square because a rectangle is more common and more easy to think about. Everyone thinks about rectangles all the time. Doors are rectangles refrigerators are rectangles windows are rectangles. People talk in rectangles more than in squares. Students usually talk in squares, but when anyone is just visiting and talking, like while riding in a car and visiting, the conversation is always certainly rectangular. Squares are not natural like rectangles are, if anyone is interested in natural and unnatural. I've only understood the natural and never bothered to be interested in the unnatural. I really don't know how to bother about it. Naturally I paint rectangular pictures in the same way that Josef Albers unnaturally paints squares. It doesn't make any difference which one one prefers, except the difference between the square and the rectangle. I paint most of my rectangles to be seen vertically. You always have to choose when working on a rectangle if you are going to have it working vertically or horizontally. It cannot be tilted so that it is diamond shape like a square can because there is no way to recognize it if it is tilted like a diamond shape. Rectangles must be either vertical or horizontal. Upon seeing a vertical rectangle I think about a piece of writing paper, the first rectangle I remember having anything to deal with.

Verdalee thought George Monk looked like a movie idol from the Thirties. Benny thought he was so dapper and somehow always caught George Monk walking slowly on Madison Avenue with an old rich lady. George had an old rich aunt whom he visited two or three times that I remember and they went to Parke-Bernet or lunched at Longchamps and these few times, Benny Andrews happened to see them. It makes a difference when seeing someone whom you recognize doing things because it explains what they are like. I tried to explain to Benny that George really was not that type, that he only did this two or three times since I knew him, but this is the way he remembered him. I told Benny that if he lived with George, Benny would certainly know him differently. Benny said he knew what I was saying, and knew George was not like this, but since he saw George two or three times walking carefully with an old rich woman, getting into or out of cabs, strolling along Madison Avenue, he just could not do anything but conclude George was like this, so indeed, George Monk became a dapper Thirties movie actor who strolled along Madison Avenue with wealthy old ladies.

Lee Guilliatt thought George was a little fat. She said he might be a very good actor, but he will always be a little fat. I agreed, and found I was talking more and seeing more with Benny Andrews and Lee Guilliatt than I was with George Monk. George Monk told me he didn't like Raw Sienna, and that made everything very strange because Raw Sienna was such an important color to me then. I have varied between Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber all the time and still do. George is brown and it figures itself altogether. George Monk was brown but there was a lot of white in it.

I told George Monk that it was not possible to dislike such a color as Raw Sienna, it's like disapproving of the color of blood. He said he hated the color of blood.

Lee Guilliatt became all ambitious and happy suddenly when Skip Weatherford come to town. He was a big black-haired Nebraskan from Nebraska from Lee's hometown. He had a crew cut and wore black-rimmed glasses and was certainly big, but mighty did not go with it.  In the Village the jeans people were just starting. There were few, but they were memorable. They had beards and long hair that hung to their shoulders. I had talked to some who had a little dirty junk shop near my first apartment on Sixth Street. They told me about peyote and offered me some. I kept trying to see what they were talking about all they had there was a rotten piece of cactus. They said it would make me very high if I didn't get sick and vomit first. I certainly was interested in the high feeling, but I vomit a lot and knew I couldn't get the results this way. Tracy gave me some pill which she called a yellow jacket once, and it was wonderful. I went to work after i had taken it and got very involved with a still-life painting by Courbet. When I met Skip Weatherford I thought of all the interesting information I knew about drugs, but then realized I had no reason to go into that because Skip was all innocence and didn't know about the bit of information I was preparing myself to talk about. He evidently was a teacher in Nebraska and had come to Manhattan for the same reason Lee and I had. Skip had a wife named Norma and a child, a boy named Sean. Why Americans my age discover the name Sean during this era is beyond me. It all traces itself back to James Joyce's characters and it's a play on some intellectual game. It's just like the fat lady that burst when she rolled off the side of a levee on her Ford tractor. The woman named Vesta who raised cactus and crocheted all the time. She had a son and decided to name him the hero's name from a "True Romance" magazine she had just finished reading. The name was Clebert and that fat son of hers had to go around all his life named Cleb. We called him Cleb. Vesta's mother-in-law got interested in naming her daughters after precious stones, so she first had Jewel, then Pearl and said if she had had another girl she would have named her Opal, but she had a son and named him Tom. That's where Tom Cummins came from. Tooke, Buck's sister married Tom and Vesta became Tooke's aunt.

My impression of Skip Weatherford was partly correct. He never got involved with drugs so much as finding the Jesus people very interesting. The next time I saw Skip he was wearing a hair net. He told me he had worn a crew cut all his life and when he started growing his hair longer it just went straight up. He found a hair stylist on MacDougal Street and was advised to wear a hair net at home that would start bending his hair so that it would fit his head. His hair did grow longer and it was very handsome. Skip and I are similar on points of excess. He knew when to stop. I've never grown my hair long because it would cause such a change in me. I cut my hair myself just enough all the time so it doesn't look like I cut it myself. I finally found that to be the secret. One time I cut it because I was invited to a smart cocktail party and wanted to look like I was a common cocktail drinker, so I cut my hair and made a terrible mistake near my left ear, I cut it far too short and when I got to the party, I kept standing with my right side showing. I also had bought a new pair of seersucker trousers. I got them for three dollars at Syms clothing store of seconds. When I got home I leaned over to pick up Mary Alice and the entire seat ripped open.How funny I must have looked at that party. Skip was being moderate with his change like me, but he never stopped collecting the new fads. He had his wife and son move to Manhattan, they got an apartment near Delancey. I'm sure Skip was very disappointed with it because it was a renovated building. This was Norma's doing. I'm sure Skip wanted a cockroach-filled apartment like Lee's and Benny's. I don't know how the Weatherfords were managing their expenses, but not long after, this apartment became their home, and I visited and loved Norma. She looked like Caroll Baker and made a lovely home. They moved to another place and finally Norma took Sean and returned to Nebraska leaving Skip alone and he grew a moustache. Later he found he could carry a guitar and the image became complete.

During Skip's early days, before he knew he even had a crew cut, he introduced Lee to Joe Hill a fat, sloppy folksinger who was from Nebraska and all kinds of places. I never could stand him. He began listening to Lee's songs and telling her how great she was, like we all felt obligated to do for some reason, but Joe Hill was more interested in Lee's voice than her songs and arranged auditions for her. Lee's voice is strong, it has ways of getting to notes in melodies that make one think she'll never make it, but she does. She's never trained but has such a capturing belief in her singing, that any training would change it entirely. Joe Hill fixed her up in every way. He arranged for a professional makeup artist to do her face, she got her hair looking very good, put on a basic black wool dress, hose and heels and became an outstanding beauty. She had a date arranged for the Jack Paar show before long and was always sliding out of her pants and sweaters into her girdle, basic black and hose and heels to go to some appointment. Nothing really came of it, but it was fun seeing Lee get together and march out to her new world. She is big; tall and big-boned. She never wore dresses, I was surprised she could walk in heels, but she changed so much when she got into a dress. We all change when we get dressed. I would escort her often to her appointments but would leave her to her own plans upon getting there because I had no part in the arrangements. When we called a cab, Lee would put her little fingers to her mouth and whistle an incredible sound which stopped any cab. Once she was so well made up she sat all night in a chair with her makeup on because she had a ten o'clock appointment the next morning and didn't know how to put makeup on. Soon this series of events ended. Skip wasn't around anymore. Joe Hill committed suicide and Lee's apartment was robbed. 

By now it was a habit for me to stay on the East Side IRT all the way past Brooklyn Bridge. Naturally I always thought that the Brooklyn Bridge stop meant the end of Manhattan and the beginning of Brooklyn, but it doesn't. The train continues on down to lower Manhattan and I was given my own stop called Fulton. There is an enormous labyrinth of stairways, gates and tunnels at that stop and when I got to know the code I found I could get any train to any place in Manhattan or Brooklyn at the Fulton stop. Going there late at night is a surprise because of many people still changing trains. There are no refreshment stands open, just lots of lights and noise of trains stopping and starting. The change that comes when going up to the street is startling late at night because there is no one on or around Fulton Street, just me walking to my loft. Even the bar is closed on the ground floor of this building and I enter the side door that leads to the stairways. The whole arrangement is so secure that I usually don't lock the door to the loft where I live. 

My association with George Monk was like a college arrangement in which the students have different majors. George's stepfather died and he went to his parents' home in Key Biscayne, Florida and stayed there for a month or so. It was nice having the loft all to myself, I worked on paintings every chance I had and found it enjoyable moving around here all alone. I often remembered I was alone and would stand in places I would not normally be. I used to play the radio and my record player at the same time and sing while all this was going on. It was a lovely thing to do and find there was never a reason for doing it. Mary Alice O'Neal always thinks whatever I did was first-rate. One Sunday morning I got up early while I was alone like this and drank some gin in milk because Bill Updike said it was good. It was good, but strange early in the morning, but I found that what happens to the system when drinking at cocktail time happens in the same way even early in the morning, but my system didn't really expect it. I went back to bed after two gin and milks. It's interesting drinking alone early on Sunday morning, but not easy like drinking at cocktail time.

George Monk returned after his visit to Florida with a great amount of Oriental things. There were gorgeous Chinese robes, lovely lacquer trays and lamps. Many books, but they were either in Chinese, or the unreadable kinds of old men's books like histories of Africa with old engraving illustrations that made them look like bible histories and they smelled that way too. George picked up some red and pink floral fabric and we made very long draperies to go on the windows and they were very beautiful. I did a large painting of the interior with George in it with all his Chinese things. Lee Guilliatt called him the Oriental Princess. Naturally George and Lee didn't get along, or maybe it was unnaturally, but they didn't get along. It seems I always was rooming with someone and having a closer friend whom I didn't room with and we would talk about my roommate a lot. When I lived with Tommy Johnson in Chicago, I was always talking about him with Jim Zver. We often met in the evenings and spent most of our time talking about Tommy Johnson. I must say Jim was very understanding and let me talk on and on. Now Jim Zver is friendly with Tommy Johnson and not me, and I guess he's just as understanding with Tommy when I'm talked about.

I don't look like anybody I know. No one whom I've talked to thinks I look like anybody they know too. Aunt Renie looks like George Washington. Selma looks like Rita Hayworth. Buck looks like his Dad who looked like Lon Chaney, Jr., who I thought was good looking. George Monk looks like an actor of the Thirties. Jean Rigg looks like Virginia May who was Aunt Florence's oldest child, who was very beautiful; still is. Tommy Johnson looks like Jonathan Watts, Bill Updike looks like Helmut Dantine, Mary Ellen Andrews looks like Nan Merriman. Jim Zver thinks I look like a Negro, he looks like a college freshman. Bill Updike's mother, Fleeta said I looked like Tojo. She looks like Helen Kane. Once, when I lived on Avenue B I got an envelope in the mail and inside was a cover of Time Magazine with a Buddhist monk's picture and over it in someone's handwriting it said, congratulations, you made it. There was no signature and I never did know who sent it. It did have an essence of what I looked like, but only because of the short hair. I always had my hair cut very short until I began cutting it myself. I do look a bit Oriental. When I'm old my eyelids are going to drop and I'll look like a turtle like Aunt Florence did. Sometimes I think I look like Aunt Hootie, but I think that has all to do with wanting to look like Aunt Hootie. I've always wanted to look like Aunt Hootie, but I don't think that will cause me to. I have a protrusion above my eyes which reminds me of Neanderthal people, but I don't look like a Neanderthal man. Robert Alda has this, so does Clet Hess, a man in Indiana who went to our church when I lived on the farm. I thought there was a chance of being as good looking as Clet Hess with this forehead of mine, but it hasn't happened yet. All I can find that happens with this type of forehead is sinus trouble. I don't think I have a new look that people will find interesting, but I do think that I will be important enough one day that people will look like me.

One evening the phone rang and I answered, and I heard, "how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen McKay." McKay was in New York. He was here to stay, he said. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing McKay. I was involved with my loft life and my work at the Metropolitan Museum, I had dance classes, Lee Guilliatt's friendship, George Monk as a roommate and could hardly fit McKay in. He wasn't the type to be interested in anything I was doing. I met him after a dance class in the Village and understood how far away he was from me. I had been here at least a year and Manhattan was normal to me and I looked like I lived here. McKay looked like he had just got out of the Army and unpacked his civvies which were two years out of fashion. It was winter and he had a huge tweed overcoat and a white silk scarf, black casual shoes with white socks. He even had cuffs on his trousers, which were not pegged nor low rise and I felt like he was an old Army buddy, just the way it really was. He had been living and working in New Orleans, which he explained over dinner at Aldo's was far superior to New York. I didn't ask why he was here, he didn't give me a chance, plus he was so fast in answering with such uncanny wit, my comment would have been cancelled right then and there. I guess McKay and I got on well because I knew where I was with him, respected his quick way of thinking and talking, and always appreciated him. I don't know what he saw in me. I didn't have anything in common with him. Perhaps that is what he saw in me. He still called me the Cow, but had added an a in front of it all and it was now a the Cow. He raved about how quickly he had found an apartment on West 71st Street and a job typing or shorthand or stenotype. He was with his old friend Frank Donohue and was full of forced energy and frantic excitement. Within the first month of being here in Manhattan he had to have an operation on his hemorrhoids, which he called "roids," and after that wore a woman's sanitary napkin for a long time. Although all this was greatly painful he held up a good and brave attitude and talked a great deal about his sanitary napkins. Around this time I had a cyst in my right ear lobe removed by a doctor when I was in Vincennes. It was Dr. Arbogast. It never did heal correctly and Lee Guilliatt learned to squeeze it and remove the clogging, and it would also take away the itching.

Tommy Johnson had come and gone away from Manhattan. He had lived here before years ago before he lived in Chicago. It is strange to me how everybody I knew finally showed up in New York. Tommy came in after Christmas and found me in my loft right after I had returned from Vincennes. I had got the flu and he saw I was miserable and rushed me to a warm comfortable apartment in Brooklyn Heights, told me to take a hot shower and cuddle down on the couch and drink bourbon and get well. I will never forget the total comfort Tommy had arranged for me, and I was well the next day. This apartment belonged to a strange tall red-headed man named Pete Redmond. I met him later, he was hard of hearing and had a crisp deep voice that sounded like it came from an amplifier nearby. Pete was slow in movement and reminded me of a Rupple, a family in Indiana that had a strange slow movement and eyes no one could understand because they were like lizard eyes. The oldest child in the Rupple family was Mary Lizzie whom Buck and I called Mary Lizard. There were many more, even a set of twins named Raymond and Ralph. They were supposed to remind me of me and my twin brother, but they didn't, we were not lizard-like that I know of. Eddie Rupple was in my class in grade school and high school and Millie was in Selma's class. I thought the Rupples were unique, but since I've met other Millies, I've seen that they are like Millie Rupple. Other Eddies are not like Eddie Rupple still. When I met Pete Redmond I acted like I acted when I was with the Rupples and we got along so well. He gave me a first edition of Carl Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven."

Tommy visited a few times here in the loft and he was shocked to find George Monk knew Rosetta Avril. Rosetta Avril was a girl whom Tommy grew up with in South Carolina, and while we were roommates in Chicago, he always had a strange photograph of her. She had posed for the photograph in some kind of modern bucket chair that seems to have been designed to mix one up on their sense of gravity. It is a common chair nowadays that has a sailcloth-like fabric that fits on bent and curved iron rods. Rosetta's pose was reasonable, but the camera was so tilted, I never knew if the photograph was sitting on its side or not. Tommy had learned all he knew about Manhattan from Rosetta. She helped him collect recordings of Mabel Mercer and Chet Baker. I had forgotten about Rosetta until he and George Monk reviewed her once more. Tommy had to come to a decision of introducing me to Rosetta at long last, and George and I were invited to dinner at Rosetta's one evening. After all, Tommy could not allow George Monk to introduce Rosetta without him, she was the most important figure in Tommy's life.

Rosetta was a singer, but no one ever heard her sing. She always talked about her agent to Tommy and I heard of her dates in the Catskills and in convention towns around Manhattan. I first heard of that strange world of industrials through Tommy's descriptions of Rosetta's world. When we got to her apartment off Central Park West at Sixty-eighth Street, Tommy answered the door. The apartment was only an Upper West Side apartment with those strange French borders that section each wall into large rectangular designs. It must have been effective once, but now when I see them all I can see is how impossible it is to hang a picture where you really want to. Rosetta came out of a hiding place wearing a black crepe street length dress. Her hair was like Selma's brown and over curled and I could see right away she was very nearsighted and would not wear eyeglasses. She was like me. Her voice was novel, rusty and thickly padded with a strange Southern accent that I can't help but thinking is a strange Southern growth like Spanish moss that lives in Southern people who live in Manhattan. Rosetta was too thick and short to be a performer that really worked in industrials, but when she focused those blind eyes on me, I would do anything for her. She was a performer indeed and even performed alone. She was wonderful in every way, had information about everything and knew all qualifications of comfort. Her bedroom had a huge round bed in it. The evening was lovely but the most astounding thing happened when George, Tommy and I said goodby. Her performance was sincerely felt and flawless as she closed the door, the instant it separated us who were out in the hall, Rosetta's eyes were no longer performing, they became everyday eyes and she was alone and nothing was happening. This is probably the only real close-up I'll ever see of a real performer.

The next day Tommy telephoned me to tell me he was leaving Manhattan, that he had had a physical examination for a new job and had showed up having active TB. I told him I had left my galoshes at Rosetta's and asked him to please pick them up before he moved away back to South Carolina to a sanitarium. A sanatorium is for mental health, and a sanitarium is for TB cure. Within the same week I got a letter from Jim Zver who was stationed in Germany with the Army. He informed me he was being flown back to America to a hospital in Pennsylvania because he had TB. I made an appointment and had an X-ray, but I didn't have any signs of TB.

By this time I had thirty-one paintings. Most of them are forty by fifty inches. I make my own stretchers and sized my raw linen canvas. The stretchers are made very poorly, but by the time the rabbit skin glue dries everything holds together. My skill is not in building stretchers, but painting on the canvas. I have tried again and again to exhibit in art shows. In the back pages of ArtNews there is a list of exhibitions to which you pay a five-dollar fee. If the painting is rejected it is returned, but the five dollars is kept. The most cruel technique is used concerning the rejection or acceptance notice. A blank is supplied where the artist writes his name, title, size and details like that, but another blank is supplied asking for name and address of the artist, which I'm happy to fill out but never notice on the reverse side is printed accepted and rejected. This blank is returned in the mail in an envelope with a window. There I am, holding my breath not daring to open it until I get upstairs, then in my own handwriting showing through the window I must open the envelope and see what has happened to my painting. It's like writing a note to myself but not knowing what I said. The only acceptance I ever got was a painting that was shown at Silvermine, Connecticut, and when I went to the opening the exhibition looked like a church basement bazaar. It was filled with people all pretending they were going to a classy art opening and they were acting so uptown. My painting looked like it should be there and it could never be included in an uptown exhibition. It didn't sell and when I got it back I painted over it. I've painted over many paintings and liked the efficiency of still having a canvas to work on. Now, when a painting doesn't work or wears its time out, I burn it and start with a new canvas. I no longer have time to count my paintings either.

That painting which was at Silvermine Connecticut was called "I remember the past with Delight" and because it was exhibited and I had a chance to see it hanging there in a public place no longer having anything to do with me it gave me a chance to see what I had done. That's why an artist is always so eager to exhibit. He doesn't care who sees them, he just wants to see them himself and find out what they are doing without him.

In Chicago I learned that I should paint a series. It was always treated as an attempt to be consistent but to me it always turns out to be a series. Some students at the Art Institute got so involved with consistency that when they did come to discover a certain idea of style, they never budged from it and walked away from school with a mountain of things all alike. I walked away from the Art Institute of Chicago with five paintings and none were alike. I remember sneaking into the school's store room, where four paintings were being kept by the school for a later exhibition of students' work. I knew I wouldn't be around to see the exhibition, I would be in Manhattan, so I took my four canvases and finally brought them here. No art school is going to have a masterpiece of mine. Of course now it's different. I've painted over all except one. It's called "Happiness in a funeral basket" and I still love it. I painted it at Saugatuck and saw it was so bad that it was good. The stretchers are not worth using again, neither is the canvas, it's cotton ducking, so, as long as I have the storage space I'll keep it. It's funny, I don't hang it, I just keep it put away and once in a while Look at it. I just got it out to look at it and like the thick calligraphic brush strokes that show the black iris. While I was still in my first apartment I spent two nights writing a letter to Betty Parsons telling her I was a student of Boris Margo, who exhibited in her gallery. I told her I wanted to exhibit my work with her gallery and enclosed a slide of "Happiness in a funeral basket." I took a long time to write the letter because I looked up each word I wasn't sure of in the dictionary. It was a perfect letter, I thought at the time. Now that I think about it, it must have been very funny. By return mail from Betty Parsons Gallery there was a note returning the slide. The note said, "I never interview artists whom I don't know," and it was signed in typing "B.P."

I don't know what would have happened if Betty Parsons found that painting interesting, because no other painting I had looked like it. Another time I decided to push "Happiness in a funeral basket" through the wall into the Museum of Modern Art garden. There are small wooden openings that are sideways and built into the stone wall. One night I took my painting up to 54th Street where the garden wall touches the Whitney Museum and attempted pushing the painting through. I was going to scratch the surface if I forced it through, plus, I saw there were huge hedges planted next to these wooden openings, and if I did get the canvas in it would lie behind these shrubs until some janitor found it and threw it away thinking it was some student junk. If I could throw it over the wall and be certain it wouldn't land in the pond, I would do that. Surely there is another way to exhibit work. I didn't throw it over and came back home here and decided I'd better paint and not be so concerned about exhibiting until I have some work. Well, now I have lots of work and am in more of a position to exhibit, but I'll worry about that some other time, perhaps after I've finished my latest painting.

 

End of Part Seven