Words Without Music: A Memoir (11 page)

After he earned his degree, Michel would spend the rest of his life as a nurse in a pediatric cancer ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, working with children that had cancer.

I asked him once, “Michel, after all the work you’ve done, why don’t you just become a doctor?”

“If I became a doctor, I wouldn’t be able to work with the children” was his reply.

He wasn’t interested in being a doctor, he was interested in doing the work.

“What’s it like?” I would ask him. “You must lose kids all the time.”

“I lose them all the time and it is very, very hard.”

Michel and I knew each other for fifty years, and his life, and his recent death, made a deep impression on me. In his seventies, Michel himself became sick with cancer. The illness lasted long enough so that he would go in and out of chemotherapy, which could be debilitating. But when he came out, as soon as he was able to work again, he would go back to the hospital and resume working with the children. As long as he could move, he continued his work at the hospital. I have met only a few people in my life who had the same awareness and tireless, active compassion as Michel.

SOON AFTER MEETING MICHEL,
I became more adventurous regarding my housing. Over the next few years I left the Upper West Side to live all over Manhattan. I was, like Michel, even a super in an apartment building in the East Sixties close to the Central Park Zoo. In the late 1950s and early 1960s apartments were not expensive, and they were plentiful all over the city, not as it is now. Rents were low and the subways dirt-cheap. When I first arrived a token was fifteen cents, the same price as a slice of pizza. A truism known probably only to New Yorkers is that the price of a subway ride and a slice of pizza would always be the same. Or they play tag with each other so closely that you would have to suspect that somewhere behind the scenes the prices of these two New York City staples are inextricably bound together—fixed, as it were. Odd facts like this abound in New York City and can keep the place endlessly interesting.

Today a young musician or dancer will have a much harder time finding an affordable place to live and work. Even part-time and occasional work was easy to find in those days. I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris and India in the late 1960s, and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.

It wasn’t only that living was cheaper and work easier to find. Back then the city was considerably less violent. On an early summer evening it was common for my friends and me to walk down Central Park West from 110th Street to Times Square, have a $1.50 dinner at Tad’s Steakhouse on Forty-Second Street, go to a movie for $1.25, then stroll back up the length of Central Park West. If it was a warm night, in the time before air-conditioning, there would be people sleeping in the park.

My last two apartments on the Upper West Side were both on Ninety-Sixth Street. By then my rent had climbed to $69 a month and, finally, a high of $125 a month, and I was ready for a change—and it was a big one. In 1959, I moved all the way downtown to Front Street, just a block away from the Fulton Fish Market. It was the beginning of the years when artists and some musicians were making over industrial lofts into living-work places. My loft was on the second floor of a building that backed onto the building on South Street that housed Sloppy Louie’s, a seafood restaurant. Between the fish market and the restaurant, there was a pervasive aroma of fish in the air—fresh, salted or cooked. The fish market itself seemed to be 24/7. I don’t remember ever seeing it completely closed, though it could slow down in the afternoons.

My first loft was an unheated square room and very large compared with what had been my standard apartment until then. It had a toilet and a cold-water basin. My neighbors and friends, there being only artists in the building, initiated me into loft living. First, I learned how to use a potbelly stove, installing it on a metal plate and connecting it with stovepipes through the top of a nearby window, then loading it with wood. The wood itself was easy to find and plentiful in that part of the city. It was almost entirely from the wooden pallets that were used to haul around materials, manufactured goods, and sometimes fish. After being used they were abandoned in the streets. You could go out with a hammer and saw and bring back armfuls of broken planks in way less than an hour. However, that was only when we didn’t have coal. In our building there was an empty elevator shaft and a few of us got together and had a half ton of coal dumped right into the shaft from the ground floor. From there we would bring soft coal up to our lofts a pail at a time.

I learned how to stack the coal so it could burn eight to ten hours without having to touch it. First you would make a good bed of embers with wood. Then on top of that you would stack the coal in a half-pyramid shape up to the top of the stove. In this way, the coal would slide down into the embers as it was burned. At that point you would shut down all the dampers and air inlets of the stove. These were not the airtight stoves, the beautiful ones from Vermont you can buy today, but they were tight enough. I kept a pail of water on the stove at all times and that was my hot water for washing and cleaning up. If you got it right, the stove could go all night. In the morning I would shake down the ash and replenish the coal. It was quite common to keep the stove burning sometimes continuously for a week, letting it go out only long enough to completely clean out the ash and start over. If you needed really hot water, you just had to open the air vents at the bottom of the front door and open the damper on the stovepipe leading out of the stove, and in twenty to thirty minutes the stove would be cherry red. I sometimes lit it up like that for company just to show off.

The stoves were easily found. A lot of hardware stores downtown would have them right out on the sidewalk for forty or fifty dollars. Then there was always Lee-Sam’s, a plumbing supply place on Seventeenth Street and Seventh Avenue. They always had a few stoves out front. The only trouble with the stove system was that this was soft coal, not anthracite, and a fine but persistent dust settled throughout the entire loft. Not many years later, living in Paris, I had a coal stove once again. Of course I was a complete expert by then, and I loved the hard anthracite that would come delivered to our
atelier
in a huge burlap sack carried on the back of a local workman. It was a much cleaner burn, but not as easy to maintain and even harder to start.

The rent for my loft on Front Street was $30 a month, and I soon learned that the other artists in the building were furious with me, because they were paying only $25. They were sure the landlord had taken advantage of my naïveté and, by charging me more, would use this as an excuse to jack up everyone else’s rent to $30. In fact, I don’t think that actually happened. I paid my rent every month to a company in Long Island City named Sterling Real Estate. I sent them a $30 money order and I don’t remember ever signing a lease.

The other tenants were all artists. John Rouson, a painter from London just a few years older than me, became a great friend. It was mainly John who tutored me in the details of loft living as we knew it in the late 1950s. He showed me how to stack the coal in the stove; he rolled his own cigarettes, which I also learned to do; and he showed me how to read the
I Ching
. He was short and slim and wore thick glasses. He spoke rarely and with a Cockney accent, to great effect. His judgments about painting, politics, poetry, and women were clear and crisp, if sometimes a bit harsh. By then Michel and I had taken up with a yoga teacher, Yogi Vithaldas, and John didn’t think much of that at all. I think his whole
I Ching
connection had more to do with the fact that John Cage used it as a compositional method than it had to do with Chinese philosophy—though he did know a bit of that, too. John was a beautiful, beautiful painter. His work was quasi-realistic—still lifes and landscapes.

John Rouson was a deep fellow, no question. He knew what it was to be an artist and live without money. He would periodically take a job at a tobacco shop near Wall Street, because he liked getting free, loose tobacco and, after a few weeks or a month, he would have a bit of cash put aside, quit work, and go back to painting. I don’t remember him ever selling a single painting. He, like Michel, had a childhood disrupted by the war. In his case, John had been sent out of London to avoid the Blitz bombing that was visited on the city. I think he missed London but didn’t miss the bombs.

Eventually, Michel and John came to know each other quite well and the three of us shared a huge appetite for new painting, dance, and performance. We would travel around the East Village and lower Manhattan seeking out the latest new and unusual artistic experiments. In 1961–62 I remember going with John to Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” in a first-floor railroad apartment on East Second Street. In each room—they were strung out one after the other, like railroad cars—was a happening or an installation, or both. In one room you might encounter a long-legged girl in fishnet stockings handing out marshmallows and hugs to the spectators who wandered casually and carelessly between the rooms. Or perhaps a room of mirrors with flashlights and candles. These were the early days of happenings. I loved everything about them, the weirder the better. And, I must say, I feel the same way today. I like all kinds of art/performance, but I love it the most when it’s fresh out of the can, not even reheated.

John was a great music lover, too, and insisted on hearing everything I wrote. By then we were no longer living on Front Street. He was in Hell’s Kitchen, and I was in Chinatown. I would go over to his place, another cold-water flat, and he would hand-grind some strong coffee in his coffee grinder, and I would put on a new tape of my latest compositions. He would peer at me, as if smiling through his thick glasses, and quietly nod his head. At times we also listened to Elliott Carter and the early recordings of Cecil Taylor.

Michel would be with us sometimes, but often quite odd people would be visiting as well, like Roland and his girlfriend, Jennifer. Now that was a pair. He was dark and as handsome as they come and had a half-closed right eye. He was always well dressed—usually a suit, shirt, and nice shoes—and Jennifer was a stunning young woman, always and forever beautiful. I had no idea who they were or what they did. They rarely spoke. I usually saw them at John’s and occasionally at a concert of mine. They seemed to drift in and out of our lives—like snowflakes lost from some storm that we had somehow missed. Over the years I’ve thought of them from time to time, but after I left for Paris in the fall of 1964, I never saw them again.

It was during this period, in the early 1960s, when I went for the first time with John and Michel to Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street. In those days, Yoko was presenting some of the earliest performance art to be seen in New York City. In the company of only a handful of other spectators, we were present for some of La Monte Young’s seminal, quite early performances. One involved a pendulum, a pointer, and a piece of chalk. Hard to describe, but in the course of several hours La Monte drew an ever-thickening white chalk line on the floor, measured by the pointer attached to the swinging pendulum. Of course the whole affair was either maddening or mesmerizing depending on your point of view. For me, it was the latter.

Another piece was called “Piano Piece for David Tudor #1” (aka “Feeding the Piano”). There would be a piano, and La Monte would come on and put a bucket of water and an armful of hay by the piano, and then he would go sit down with the audience, really only a handful of people. We would sit there with the piano and the water and the hay, and after a while, when La Monte decided that the piano had eaten enough, he would pick up the hay and the water and he would leave.

But that wasn’t all La Monte did. He also composed music that was a sustained, low-pitched, quiet tone that rumbled at the low end of what was humanly audible. Later, he studied Indian vocal music with the Indian master Pranath and also became an accomplished singer-composer. Not long ago I visited his Dream House, on Church Street, just below Canal Street in New York City, for a Sunday afternoon concert. The small loft was packed with young people. La Monte still performs wonderfully.

JOHN ROUSON USED TO PAINT A SELF-PORTRAIT
on every birthday.

“How long will you continue this?” I asked him once.

“Not much longer,” he said. “Because I won’t live to be more than thirty.”

I took that as a strange, but not serious, comment. I didn’t think he was asking for my solicitude. How would he know? He seemed to be healthy. He didn’t have a terminal illness of any kind—he was completely well.

A few years later, when I was living in Paris, John and Michel were sharing a bike on a cross-country ride. They had just stopped for the night at a motel on the road, and John said, “I’m going to take a little ride on the bike.”

Michel called me on the phone in Paris.

“John just died,” he said.

“What happened?”

“We’re in Wyoming, and he got on the bike, and he wasn’t going very fast—in fact, he was going rather slow—and the bike fell over and he died.”

“Did he hit something?”

“No, the bike simply fell over.”

“Did he have a helmet on?”

“Yes.”

“How did he die?”

“We don’t know. He was on the bike, the bike went down, and he was dead.”

It happened about fifty or sixty feet from the motel, with Michel watching. It was John’s thirtieth birthday.

A little later, another odd thing happened. An actor named David Warrilow, who was a member of a theater company we formed in Paris (later, in New York, we named it Mabou Mines), called me from London. I was just back from India and Paris and living in New York again.

David had been in touch with some medium or psychic in London. He was into that kind of thing, though it didn’t mean much to me. Anyway, David said his English psychic friend had a message for me from a painter who had known me. I told David that, yes, I had such a friend and he had recently died.