Memoirs of a beatnik (7 page)

In the cabin they were all seasick; the roof was leaking. Martha sat holding a blanket like a tent over Sweet William who, huddled in foetal position, was trying to sleep. Helen and Tomi were trying to play cards, but after a while they gave that up and just sat there, Tomi, pale as death, making small noncommittal grunts in answer to Helen's incessant chatter.

A picture flashed into my mind from a storehouse of memory, a story Tomi had told me about a music teacher she had had a crush on as a child of twelve. How the woman had finally seduced her one day under the walnut tree in front of the house. How Martha had seen them and threatened Tomi with reform school and the woman with the police if she ever came to the house again. Now, as I thought of that story, they all three appeared in my head in Victorian dress: Tomi and her friend standing formally, almost

April Concluded

classically, under the tree, Martha corseted and in a high ruff standing in the doorway of the house. Rather like Henry James, I thought. They think they're Fitzgerald, but they're like a mean Henry James. . . .

There was no air in the cabin, and it was stifling hot. I picked up In Country Sleep, and read by the light of a flashlight. "Never and never my girl riding far and near. . . "

We got there, though I don't know how, docking in Stamford finally, and by then I knew that I couldn't face another night of it, that I had to go somewhere, anywhere, out of there, out of that thick air, those woven lives. I knew that once I got away I would find the means to stay away, that I would not be seeing Tomi again.

"Yes," she said, "you can catch the 9:20, but I thought you were coming back with us."

I mumbled something about having just remembered some job or other that I would have to get to in the morning, some lame excuse, while Martha scrutinized me with those ultra-clear grey eyes.

"All right then, we'll leave you at the station," she said with more kindness than I had ever heard from her. "Serge can bring in your suitcase when he goes to the city to work tomorrow."

Tomi said nothing, but when we piled into the car she contrived to sit next to me. I was aware of the flesh of her thigh against mine, the understated harshness of her breathing. We rode in silence, and when I got out Tomi got out with me, to walk with me to the ticket booth and get me on the right platform. It was still raining softly.

"Di Prima," said Tomi, "di Prima, talk to me."

"What is there to say?" I asked her. "You know what you're giving up."

I meant O'Reilley, but I meant light and freedom, air and laughter, the outside world—outside of the stuffy incestuous atmosphere of her "family life." I meant drawing tables in high white rooms, nights at the ballet or at some exotic restaurant, or simply wandering, exploring the neon streets. And mostly I meant laughter, the silliness and glee unscrutinized, one's blood running strong and red in one's own veins, not drawn to feed the uneradi-cable grief of the preceding generation.

April Concluded

"I'll forget her," said Tomi, meaning O'Reilley. "I can't do it to Martha."

We were mercifully in shadow, and I took and kissed those small, beautiful hands again and again, before I turned and walked to the platform without looking back.

And at last my tears fell, as the rain fell, endlessly, hopelessly, as I watched the old black Chrysler pull out and turn toward the Darien woods, carrying the small creature I loved better than anything else in the world.

Some Ways To Make A Living

down a recipe for poor food for me: something called "hopping John," made of brown rice and kidney beans with ham hocks.

Bob was a bartender at a downtown Fifth Avenue bar. He was tall and beautiful and very black, and he did these gigs by day to pick up a little extra money.

I sat there, tired and vaguely hungry, half listening as the three talked, and half letting my thoughts roam wherever they would.

It was just a few weeks since I had moved into the apartment on the Lower East Side that I had found for myself after Tomi had decided not to join me. Without her, the Village studio I had found for us had somehow lost its point, and besides it was way too expensive. Instead I had taken a tiny "renovated" two and a half rooms, on Avenue A and Fifth Street. I had a forward-looking landlord, an ancient rabbi who had decided, way back then, that the East Side was to become the "new Village" and he had bought up a few tenements, cut down the apartments to appropriately small sizes, and was hoping to rent them to impoverished young people who thought as he did, or who simply wanted a haven, any haven they could afford, within walking distance of the bars, coffee shops and book stores.

I was the only one he had found so far. Whenever I entered or left the smelly hall of that sad building, whose exterior bravely sported a new coat of grey paint, I ran the gauntlet of the small, suspicious eyes of literally hundreds of Polish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian women, who could not tell what I was doing in their midst, but did not like it, did not like it at all.

Walking down Fifth Street from Avenue A, I first passed an incredibly odoriferous funeral parlor, then a small meat-packing concern whose sidewalk was perpetually stained and greasy from sausage fat, and then an equally rank bar, where I daily experienced the scrutiny and catcalls of the lewd, sex-starved men who belonged to the aforementioned narrow-eyed women. Proposals were there made to me, desperations held out, hopes whispered, that were somehow lower and more loathsome than anything I have encountered anywhere since.

After paying the rent, the month's deposit, the one-month agency fee, the gas and electric deposit, and the telephone deposit, and purchasing such bare necessities as a frying pan and a blanket, I found myself totally broke, and began to look around anxiously

Some Ways To Make A Living

for a way to earn a living. On a crosstown bus I had found a discarded copy of Show Business, and there found an ad for "sexy girl models," which offered an enticing ten dollars an hour and up. I had my doubts about whether or not I qualified, but I was amply filling out my C-cup brassieres, and my waist was the prescribed ten inches smaller than my bust and hip line, which came to within an inch of being the same size, and so, having no information to go on except a phone number, I decided to give it a try.

Two days and three phone calls later, I found myself in the office of one Gay Faye, while he regarded me sagely.

"Stand up again, dear, will you?" he had said abruptly. "Now, turn around, let me see you from the side. Well, it's worth a try, I guess. Raise your skirt, will you, let me see your legs."

I bent to do so, hoisting my skirt to within half an inch of my pussy, wondering what he would propose next.

"Look," I said. "I'm not shy. Why not just have me undress, and see if I'll do or not?"

"I'm coming to that, dear," said Gay with a grimace. "I'm coming to that. I like to work up to it slowly. Take off your skirt and blouse now, let me see your undies. My God, what dowdy lingerie, I hope you brought something better with you."

"Yes," I said, "I brought a couple of garter belts and stockings and some sheer panties and a black lace bra."

"Well, that's a start, anyway," said he, lighting a Du Maurier. "Now take off your underwear."

I did, and he said, "Now put your panties back on and take them off again, only this time turn your back to me while you do it."

I obeyed, feeling rather like a trained seal in a circus, while he regarded my ass, first from one side and then the other.

"Not bad," said Mr. Faye. "You really look much pudgier in those clothes than you actually are. Women never will learn to dress." He perched his brittle and angular self on the edge of the desk. "Do you want to start today?"

"Sure," said I. "Why not? I mean, I'd like to, very much." I felt as if I had started already.

"Good," he said. "Then put that robe on, will you? And you might as well go into the kitchen and fix yourself some coffee. We can't start till the marks go away."

"Marks?" I said.

Some Ways To Make A Living

"Red line under your breasts from your bra," he said with some relish. "Almost looks like a welt. Small crease on your stomach from the elastic of your underpants."

"True," I said, though I had never thought of it before. I felt like the heroine of an S-and-M novel.

I put on the robe, a thirties imitation of a black silk kimono, embroidered with the loudest and most obnoxious of peonies, and wandered off in the direction he had indicated to see if I could indeed make some coffee.

Mr. Gay Faye was as gay as his name. He absolutely hated the female form, and devoted the entire practice of his art to contorting, obscuring and confusing it by any means possible. The productions of his camera, reproduced in full color by the tens of thousands, passed as sexy, were glued onto calendars and hung in garages and dens all over America. They kept him and the ex-weight lifter who kept house and lived with him in the comfort they so amply deserved.

We began with a series of nude shots, me kneeling and sitting back on my haunches, my hands in my long hair and my head turned to the side—trying to look coy, or what I thought was coy, which I later altered to what I thought Gay Faye would think was coy. A whole series of back shots, me leaning over an armchair, chin propped in my hands, looking bored. A shot of me bending over, looking out through my legs.

"I'm very limited," complained Gay, "because of your hair. Look, if we do a lot of this, would you consider shaving your pubic hair?"

I got a prickly, itchy feeling between my legs at the very thought, and I frowned—what I hoped was thoughtfully.

"I don't know," I said. "Depends on how much work there is."

"Certainly not," is what I was thinking. "Life is hard enough."

I strode about in a garter belt and stockings and high-heeled shoes. Stood in a sheer nightie against a window, legs spread apart, arms stretched straight up. Curled up on a bearskin, nude again, with Gay's obnoxious little chihuahua in my lap, covering the offending hair. Stood by Gay's table with its lace tablecloth in a maid's cap and apron and the eternal high heels, holding a silver tray with a silver tea service just below my bare boobs. Stepped out of the shower dripping wet, in lace shower cap and scanty towel,

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Some Ways To Make A Living

one long strand of red hair cling* ng wetly to my breast and curling around the nipple.

We stopped, exhausted. Warren the weight lifter went out for hero sandwiches and containers of coffee. Then I got dressed and we called it a day.

I worked for Gay two or three times more. And then on one occasion Duncan dropped in to do some shooting on the bearskin rug, and asked me if I'd work for him.

"The work is a little different," he said. "More-uh-realistic. But the pay is better-I'll give you twenty-five dollars an hour."

"Great," I said. (My rent was forty-five dollars a month.) "When do you want to start?" I figured he meant pornography, but had already decided that real, honest-to-god pornography would not be half as obscene as the stuff I was doing for Gay.

There had followed a series of these ultra-polite sessions. Most of the porn was faked, and what little was not was performed with a combination of courtesy and know-how that left me curious as to what the follow-up would be like.

Duncan had offered me a permanent job as his secretary and receptionist in addition to the shooting sessions, the only stipulation being that I work—type, answer the phone, etc.—entirely in the nude. I declined, because, as I explained to him, I figured that I was making more than enough money and didn't want to tie myself up with a regular job. Duncan chortled endlessly at the idea that he had offered me a "regular job," and we continued to get together a couple of times a week for shooting sessions.

Now, just as I was about to get dressed to go home, Bob turned to me, and I could see that, whatever it was that he had on his mind, he had been mulling it over for some time.

"Say, listen, Diane, I wonder if you would do me a favor. I never told you this, but I have a collection—I've been collecting photographs of cunts for some time now. I guess I have over three thousand cunts by this time: white ones, black ones, chink cunts, all kinds. I even have Joan Crawford's cunt. So I was wondering—I was wondering would you let Duncan take a picture of your pussy. You don't have to do anything, nobody else in the picture, just lie there, just you lie back with your legs open and let him take a picture of your pussy."

Some Ways To Make A Living

"Sure," I said. "Why not?" I turned to Duncan. "You want to do that now?"

"If you're not too tired," said Duncan. "I'm still set up."

I lay back on the couch, Joe got up and switched on the floodlights, Bob watched, impassively drinking his beer while Duncan clicked his camera, made a few adjustments of the lens, moved me slightly and clicked it again.

"I tried two different openings," he said to Bob, and laughed uproariously at his own pun. "We'll see which comes out better."

"Hey, listen, thanks a lot," Bob said as I started to get dressed.

"Oh, it was nothing," I told him truthfully enough. "I'd sure like to see your collection sometime."

"Anytime you want," said Bob. "Maybe," he added hopefully, "when Duncan gets this developed you could sign it for me."

"Sure," I said, "I'll come up to your place and sign it."

The telephone was ringing when I got back to the apartment. It was Petra, calling from the mysterious "downtown" where she worked.

"Dearie, do you want to pick up some money? I have a little job for you."

"Sure," I said. "Anything short of streetwalking."

"There's a fellow in my office who needs a correspondent for his divorce case. You don't have to do anything-I mean he won't molest you or-"

"You mean I don't have to fuck him."

"Right, dearie, nothing like that, you just have to be seen—oh, it's very complicated—do you want to do it? I'll give you his phone number."

"I guess so," I said, "near as I can make out."