Fuck, shit, puke, staring at a blank page.
It’s summer, 1978 in New York City.
The Serial killer David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, is convicted of murder after terrorizing New York for 12 months.
It was a big summer for movie openings for some, not for Henry. Grease opened on June 16, with Saturday Night Fever and Close Encounters of the Third Kind soon followed.
Both Grease and Saturday Night Fever ushered in an awful decade adrift in confetti, disco music, itchy polyester, and cocaine.
Steve Ruben, the owner of Studio 54 made it a point not to let anyone in his club who dressed like John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever, Tony Manero.
Studios 54 was in its own stratosphere, elevated upwards into the Upper Room night after night— a rocket blasting through the heavens.
One evening Henry, who wore his hair braided and oiled Native Indian style, stood outside Studio 54, making it to the velvet rope and being rejected by the doorman Marc Beneke who says to him,
go cut your hair and come back,
He never went back, pissed that the doorman told him to cut his hair, preferring dives and neighborhood bars to Studio 54.
Writing’s junk, I do it for fun and will never be published.
If it sounds like writing, piss all over your typewriter.
The mental picture of a galled woman getting up from her chair and walking out of a poetry reading comes to mind— one of Henry's many cataloged nightmares.
In the late 70s, he jumped on the flow of consciousness bandwagon, handwriting stuff thoughtlessly on yellow legal pads a mile a minute, his mind vacillating between consciousness and unconsciousness.
He’d go to the village poetry slams nightly, patiently listening to hippy poets with names like Toad, Antler, Sage, or Ode read, hating their stuff.
When it was his turn at the podium he’d shamelessly read odious metaphor, so bad that people, mostly women, would get up and walk out of the coffee shop, feeling empowered after registering their disapproval.
His woeful use of metaphor was repulsive.
Like,
she had an unforgettable face thanks to a severe case of acne.
Or,
the smell in the tavern was like the essence of vomit and a fart captured in a sealed jar.
And,
when she spread her legs in the yard at night the moon showered cosmic rays on her beaver.
Even,
he hated the smell of bug spray so he gave cockroaches the run of the house.
And,
The sun moves up and down like a whore in bed.
During the readings, he behaved more like a carnival barker than a poet— insulting the walkouts, breathing heavily, slobbering into the microphone saying,
you’re not supposed to run out until I say— fetch.
Or,
go buy a brain, it’s Black Friday.
Even,
sweetie, that high horse you're ridden out on makes your ass look titanic.
After a month of appalling recitations, the cafe owners catch on, 86ing him from the village poetry slams. But the ban has a side effect— Henry becomes an urban legend of bad prose.
During a conversation with Al Spats the raconteur over coffee and pie at a cafeteria in the Meatpacking district, Al tells him,
Henry, I’ve been to your readings. Your work isn’t about poetry, it’s about the dynamic of lousy metaphor sending the audience into a tale spin.
Word has gotten around that you’ve been 86’d from the village poetry scene, forget it, folks dead, Dylan killed it when he went electric.
Let's put together an art happening in the Meatpacking District that will rock the prevailing social and political order.
He thanks Al Spats, shaking his hand and heading out. Al's ahead of his time, one of the first people in New York to dress in leather other than visiting rodeo cowboys.
It’s late afternoon, thirsty he walks eleven blocks to a bar he knows for happy hour— The Clockwork Lounge in the East Village.
Inside, he sits at the bar. The joint is painted black and covered with graffiti from the ceiling to the checkerboard tile floor. He wonders why the barfly graffitist didn't spray paint on the floor?
Graffiti, obsessive, and immoderate.
Graffiti, it’s vandalism ain’t it? Not fine art.
Talking about graffiti in the hipster bar, The Clockwork Lounge, is like— a White man talking about Malcolm X or The Reverend Al Sharpton in a Harlem bar— shut the fuck up because there’s no way you can say the right thing.
And then there’s Banksy— if you could delicately sledgehammer one of his graffiti masterpieces from the side of a building and put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle it might be worth millions.
Two Goombahs, owners of a pizza parlor in Hell’s Kitchen, did exactly that— bringing a fit-together Banksy graffiti piece, Cardinal Sin, chiseled from a building wall to a Manhattan art dealer in the back of a dump truck. The dealer walks outside to the parked truck, takes a look, and says,
I'll give u 60 bucks for it.
When it comes to graffiti there’s too much in the city. Most, the work of social misfits whacked on spray paint fumes.
When New Yorkers see a subway covered with graffiti they shake their heads saying,
another masterpiece.
Anyway, he's sitting at the bar in The Clockwork Lounge staring at a bumper sticker on the mirror that reads,
WORLD’S FAVORITE PUNK ROCK DIVE
The sticker has it’s own special brand of graffiti on it, written with Magic Marker in lousy penmanship reading,
KEN SUCKS, KEN SUCKS, FUCK U KEN
He reckons Ken is the bartender and the loving words were written by a queer fan while Ken was busy in the men’s room.
He orders a boilermaker from the bartender and asks,
are you Ken?
Yep, that'd be me.
I think you have an admirer, Ken.
On his third drink, Henry eyeballs a radiant woman at the end of the bar. She's wearing a flannel shirt with jeans, and her hair is in rollers. He says,
I’d like to buy the lady at the end of the bar a drink.
Ken serves her another vodka martini. She stands with drink in hand, walking to Henry and sitting next to him saying,
you're Henry Lucowski, I’ve been to your readings. Is it true you've been banned from village slams because of rotten prose?
They look at each other, laughing hardily, bending at the stomach.
I’m Hannah Wilke, I’m an artist. He tells her,
I’ve seen your work at MoMa and been to your performances. What's with the wads of chewing gum on your face and body when you perform? She answers,
The gum is a perfect metaphor for the American woman—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out, and pop in a new piece.
Henry finds her answer funny but doesn’t want to laugh because the wads of gum on her face and body during performances are legendary.
And, for Christ’s sake, he didn’t want to come off as sexist, knowing Hannah’s a radical feminist, but he floats a trick question anyway,
can I call you baby?
Only when we’re fucking Henry, never in public. Henry's still standing so he floats another one,
I’ve seen ultra-feminist slash radical lesbians at NYU who take testosterone to grow facial hair. She answers,
Feminism isn’t about women with facial hair, it’s about systemic change for women in society. Honestly, I don’t need a man to tell me what to do, I only need his cock.
How can you separate one from the other?
Yeah, that’s a problem. Henry let’s go to my loft, no sex though, I’m in a relationship,
Hannah, you’re a national treasure.
Like Route 66 or The Cadillac Ranch?
Yeah, that's right, let’s get a taxi.
Hannah pays the bar tab, the new pals walk outside to Essex Street. She puts her forefingers in her mouth, whistling— giving off a high pitched shrilled sound causing his middle ear to ring.
A taxi stops and they get inside, sitting in the back seat. Hannah says to the hack, a Rastafarian who smells of ganja,
222 Bowery Street, the old YMCA.
The location is known as The Bunker. Once a YMCA rooming house for the down and out in the Bowery, and now a residence for famous artists— Claus Oldenburg, William Burroughs, Jean-Michael Basquiat, and occasionally Andy Warhol.
The Bunker is similar in character to The Chelsea Hotel, but the rooms are much larger, ten times the size of the Chelsea rooms.
Hannah leads Henry through the arched doorway entrance of The Bunker. There's a white number over the entrance reading,
222
They walk into the five-story brown brick building, he follows her up the steps to the 5th floor because Hannah believes The Bunker elevator is going to fall any day, something to do with astrology.
Room 505 is a large rectangular room with two arch windows, a hardwood floor, a quilt-covered mattress stacked on a homemade bed frame, a tiki bar strung with red pepper lights, and a coffee table in front of a sofa, both from Goodwill.
She has painted the coffee table white with lined pink vaginas on it. Noticing he's staring at it she says,
I call the painted table, Marching Vaginas.
Hannah mixes two vodka martinis at the tiki bar, hands one to Henry, and sits on the bed across from the red sofa where he's sitting, she asks him,
will you give me a head massage?
She gets up from the bed, going to the sofa, lying face-up on it with her head in his lap.
He fakes it, remembering what he can from Thai massage houses, rubbing her temples in a circular motion. Hannah says,
Oh, that’s much better, I love it.
Henry, I want to do a performance piece with you tomorrow at midnight in the basement of MoMA— Venus and the Moon are coming together.
Sure, whataya have in mind?
Read the worst of your poetry, I'll place baskets of rotten fruit in the audience. As you're reading, I’ll sit in the audience, naked with wads of chewing gum on my face and body, and my hair in rollers. Then, I'll yell abusively, throwing fruit at you, encouraging the crowd to do the same.
He passes out on Hannah’s sofa and she sleeps on the bed. In the morning they go for coffee at Hester Street Cafe.
After chocolate croissants and expresso, they go their own ways, he goes home. The plan is to meet in the basement of MoMA at 10 PM later that night.
Dutifully, Henry shows at 10, an hour and a half later he asks a MoMA usher,
is Hannah Wilke doing a performance piece at midnight? The usher says,
no, nothing scheduled.
Henry walks out of MoMA hailing a taxi, taking it to an all-night bar in the Bowery, The Last Second Saloon.
Feeling dejected he sits alone in a corner booth, drinking boilermakers till he’s drunk silly, entertaining himself by watching the bums in the bar drink port, act out, and scream at each other, closing the dive at 6 AM.
He never saw Hannah Wilke again.
