Edie (51 page)

Edith took so many! Along with her amphetamine usage, she took barbiturates to go to sleep. That’s why she had so many fires—because she was in such a barbiturate fog that it would cause a roller-coaster reaction and eventually she would nod off with cigarettes. In the Margouleff apartment alone she went through three mattresses and about five fires. It was incredible how fast she could set a bed on fire with a cigarette. The trouble was you’d have to wait for her to pass out to take the cigarette out of her fingers. She’d get really indignant and bitchy if you tried while she knew what you were doing.

Yet you’d leave the room, gone just two minutes, and
BOOM,
 the next thing you knew she’d be asleep and there’d be smoke coming out of the bed and a hole in the mattress this big. Sometimes she had convulsions and scared me half to death . . . wicked. She’d say all the things in her subconscious that had been bothering her . . . that she’d been smiling
at people and kissing their asses for nothing. She’d let it all out. She attacked Margouleff viciously; she’d call him a “cheap kike” to his face. She was
wicked!
“You. rotten kike, you cheap bastard, Jew motherfucker, small-time entrepreneur!” Oh, yes, once in a while she’d get a good one in.

Margouleff would say, “Get her to bed. Tie her down if you have to.” He seemed very practical about the whole thing. But then all of a sudden, sitting there, he’d begin to shake. He was so upset about that whole experience. Just incredible!

Edith’s parents, of course, were terribly concerned and I think very sincere about what was happening to their daughter. There were telephone calls to California. They turned up on the telephone bills . . . Margouleff screaming: “I’m not paying for this! I’m paying her a salary. That’s
enough.”
Mrs. Sedgwick—I felt like I was talking to my own mother. She wanted me to report to her. “Well, how badly burned is she?”

“Well, it’s all right, Mrs. Sedgwick. The doctor is doing a lot and he says there won’t be any physical damage . . . maybe a little nerve damage.”

Then she’d hem and haw and I knew what was coming next. Is she on drugs?”

When I’d just met Edith, I’d say, “Well, Mrs. Sedgwick, she’s off drugs and she hasn’t been on them.” That*s truly what I thought. All the time Edith in the background would be giving me signals with those big bandaged hands. If I ever got even
near
a topic that was sensitive, there was a lot of waving of those big baseball mitts.

“She’s not on heroin, is she?”

I’d say, “Oh,
no,
not on heroin” . . . and Edith would go “Mmmmm,” waving her hands in the air.

“Is she drinking? Is she stI’ll an alcoholic?”

“Mrs. Sedgwick,” I’d say, “I’ve never seen her pick up a glass with anything but fruit juice and milk in it.”

“Oh, thank you,” Mrs. Sedgwick would say. “I’m so glad she finally has someone who cares.”

I wondered how many times she’d said this to someone on the phone. She must have been through it a hundred times. I could tell she was going through a great deal of grief . . . I mean, she was a real mother, and I felt sorry for her.

Then Edith would get onto the phone and I’d listen in on the extension so Edith and I could talk about it afterwards.

I never met anyone who wanted to go home so much. She used to
show me pictures of herself on cruises and in Europe . . . pictures of her on an ocean liner. She must have been at least thirty to forty pounds heavier. I could hardly believe it was the same person. She’d say, “Isn’t it incredible?” She looked so much like little Miss Innocence; a healthy Ail-American girl, and what a lovely debutante. But Edith didn’t much like herself like that. She would say, “Aren’t I ridiculous? I look like all the rest of them. Don’t you think I’m more fabulous now?” Well, I agreed. She
was
more fabulous.

Oh, I was totally awed and impressed to have such a glamorous, exciting woman in my company. I was totally infatuated and madly in love with her. One night—it was the night she had so many drugs she had convulsions and set fire to the bed—we curled up to go to sleep; I put my hand under a T-shirt she was wearing. She responded. But so very gently. Hardly any physical movement at all. It was totally boring and uninteresting—like having sex with a child. She didn’t even know how to kiss. She was very fond of kissing around the hairline with little gentle kisses.

When Edith was with someone she really liked and she was on speed and wide awake, she must have been the wildest fuck in town. Amphetamines make you very wild and degenerate about sex, they really do . . . very creative and demented. If s like an eight-hour nonstop stretch of sniffing amyl nitrate. You have no idea. No idea! So wonderful, so inspired, so uninhibited . . . it’s one of the truly inspired sex accessories there ever was. You became a sex addict—it’s divine. That’s the main reason so many of that crowd took it, because that’s what they all had in their minds ninety percent of the time: sex. Totally sex-oriented. Amphetamine was only fabulous for that. Everything else that it did for you was boring.

But this night with Edith I was very disappointed. She didn’t even remember it, never mentioned it: which was a little heartbreaking. I don’t think she really knew how to be in love with anybody . . . not just because of what happened that night. She didn’t know how to be
in love.
If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anybody else. Sex to her that night was about as useful as when I gave her a bath or combed her hair or helped her across the street; I was like a Boy Scout. But she was very drugged. How much can a dead body enjoy a piece of sex?

It was strange. She thought nothing of exposing her lower sexual area, but she always covered her breasts. Even that night we had sex, she kept the top on and took her pants off. Her breasts were about the size of pears; very small breasts . . . which is very attractive on certain
women. Especially for me, because I don’t know what to do with very large breasts.

I thought she’d be kind of great. Absolutely great. She was so dynamic on so many levels. Sexually, physically, since she was very lithe, very muscular. And the face. I’ve always been in love with the face. The face is
everything
to me. I’ve been to bed with more trolls that had beautiful faces. I even picked up somebody with a beautiful face who turned out to be a deformed dwarf with no arms and one leg—I swear to God—a man I met in a bar. I couldn’t tell that just about everything on him was artificial. He was just beautiful; he could sing opera like a
professional,
he was so talented. He was quite short.
Very
short. He came back to my apartment, and I thought he was walking funny. I was so dumb. This beautiful, beautiful face! You have no idea what I went through. When we got to my room, he took off his arms and dropped them to the floor. On one side, the left side, he had a whole hand coming out of his shoulder. On the other side he just had this little finger sticking out of his body. I laugh about it now, but . . . oh, my God! Then he unhooked his leg. I was sitting there in total shock. Then he stood on the one leg that was really there, balancing on this little leg, and, shaking as he leaned way forward, these little fingers pushed his underwear down: and I fainted! I absolutely fainted. He had two cocks that grew together and then separated into two heads. I just slid down to the floor. He was saying: “Do you mind if I take a bath?”

I said, “No. Please do. Take a bath.”

So he hopped in and filled the tub—God knows how he did it . . . I mean with
what?
One of those little appendages?

I must have waited five hours for him to come out of that bathroom. When he was in there, I never heard a sound. I kept listening; I was waiting for the water to splash, anything. I said, “Oh, my God! This
thing
is dead in my bathroom! It drowned!”

He finally came out and I put him to sleep on the couch. He was getting off on what he was doing, taking everything off and shocking me. The next day I told him, “Please. Listen. If I could
buy
you a contract at the Metropolitan Opera so you could sing, I would. Anything! But you have to leave!”

There was always a stream of people turning up at Margouleffs apartment—maybe not as strange as the opera singer, but just as twisted! Lots of them came to hustle Edith. Mostly under the guise of getting drugs for her. She was always very trusting, and also open to receiving something new to get high on. She’d hand out hundreds
of dollars and the people going out to get the drugs just wouldn’t bother coming back.

She was really a terribly absurd person . . . people just conning it out of her, or just borrowing it, or stealing it. I remember only once I actually abused her. I took two dollars off her when I was broke. I was never so ashamed of anything in my life. I went to Max’s to meet some people. She gave me hell in the morning for it. She said, 1 had five dollars when I went to sleep and there’s only three left.” I said, “Well, I took two dollars out of your pocketbook.” I was never so ashamed of anything. What can I say? They were very strange times. I have no idea how long Edith stayed with me. It seemed like a lifetime.

HUDDLER BISBY
 In 1783 a European shipping tycoon built a stone castle on a cliff on the Jersey side of the Hudson River . . . he was hanged as a spy shortly after the construction was completed. By the neck until dead.

By 1965 all that remained of the castle was the ornate Victorian guest house with its stained-glass windows, elaborate wooden gingerbread trim, a small moat and endless stone walls, extremely well suited for imaginary aerialism in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

The castle was like a psychedelic hotel. Haight-Ashbury East. The long winding driveway almost always featured one sort of Day-Glo bus or another. In the early Sixties it was occupied by two young artists, Tom Daly and Peter Max. They made posters showing what the world looked like through the eyes of a person who lived in a psychedelic hotel on a cliff on the Jersey side of the Hudson River.

The best thing Edie does in
Ciao!Manhattan
is a scene in the very early dawn. She’s walking on a brick wall near the Fort Lee castle. An imaginary aerialist, balancing on an imaginary high wire. The way her muscles are moving, fluid at that time, if s very hydraulic, very much in tune with the wind.

Edie’s success as a drug geisha was based on her ability to handle high-speed drugs at high speeds . . . at
very
high speeds. Difficult to do. The secret of her charisma was that she was only really beautiful when
she was running not just at fifteen miles an hour, or fifty, or eighty-eight, but at fifteen hundred.

With people doing it together, each drug experience is like a group hypnosis, like we tune to each other until we’re one radio. But even so, there’s got to be at least one professional specialist in the broadcast, an anchor, a source of stability. Edie was one of those people who held you down, kept you from going nuts, because it didn’t matter to her that you were going fifteen hundred miles an hour, she was okay at that speed.

ALLEN GINSBERG
 The producers had the idea that since the film was about Manhattan, and they’d found a castle that overlooked the city, it would be interesting to do an imaginary sylvan scene, or rustic scene, or barbaric scene, or Fontainebleau scene, with a group of nymphs, satyrs—naked as if savages from another planet, time, century, era, mode of consciousness—looking across the Hudson River at the glittering light of fish-shaped Manhattan. I never got the idea of the whole film. All they wanted me to do was chant mantras across the river to New York. I thought that was harmless—in fact, might even do some good: a contrast combining nakedness with self-confidence, presence, or majesty of some kind that comes from grounding in meditation and mantra—an aspiration toward a spiritual approach including and beyond dope, sex-craze-hysteria.

It was unclear what was being done: some young people wandering through a forest toward a precipice overlooking Manhattan. Was I supposed to be a sort of naked satyr-king leading a band of hippies through the woods to overlook modern civilization? The Fall of the House of Usher”? The natives peeping through the bushes?
King Kong?
Something like that was going on. Now, what they got on the camera I never saw.

JEAN MAKGOULEFF
 I was really shocked by some of the things I saw. An example: one fine day on the set they had Allen Ginsberg sitting on a log with all these young people around him while he was doing his karma or his mantra, whatever, with all these young ladies and men around him, and he was in the buff. He was absolutely
naked.
They photographed him that way and I said to my son, Bob, “If you put
that
in the film, please do not put our name on it in any way, shape, or manner, because I just don’t want to be associated with that kind of thing. I don’t care if his name
is
Allen Ginsberg.” It isn’t the kind of thing that was done in my generation, and I don’t know how much younger Allen Ginsberg is than I am, but it certainly isn’t becoming in
Ms
generation either. Or any generation.