There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 11

Date: About 1961 to 1965

There's a Cow in Manhattan

Part Eleven

McKay has gone crazy. He had got a job teaching stenotype at a Business College and they appointed him Dean of Men and he was doing very well. On weekends he tutored two girls in stenotype at his apartment and one Saturday one of the girls telephoned me and told me there was something wrong with him. He had received them for class, but began crying and was drinking and complaining about how he couldn't make any sense of anything. I didn't know the girls very well, but the one on the telephone told me McKay had passed out and had been sleeping for twelve hours. The girls had taken shifts watching him to see he didn't do anything more strange than sleep. Of course they asked me to go over to his apartment on West Seventy-first Street and take care of him until he woke up or until Frank Donohue, his roommate returned from his visit to South Carolina where he was visiting his home. I went and found McKay sound asleep in bed with his clothes on and two frightened young girls who both talked at once about how strange McKay had been behaving. They found he had been giving long lectures at school all about God and not teaching any of his subjects. Then, when the time for classes was up, he insisted on the students remaining until his lecture was completed.

I stayed for the rest of Saturday and on until Sunday and McKay never did wake up. He would go to the bathroom, then drink some water out of the tap, then lie down again and go off into an exhausting sleep. I read a great deal of the novel "Hawaii" and all of "To Kill a Mockingbird," and Sunday evening McKay woke up and indeed he was crazy. He talked only of his mixed-up thoughts and his frights and I could see he was making no sense to me or himself. Finally on Monday afternoon I talked him into visiting some clinic for mental health that the girls he taught suggested he go to. I left him sometime on Monday. Frank telephoned a few times and was frantic. By the end of the week McKay decided he would move to my loft for a while because he was afraid to be alone. I didn't know what to do, and suddenly here was McKay with his cat, Tom, and a record of Della Reese, which he played constantly. The next day he only talked of blue and kept asking me to do a blue painting. I was working on a copy of a Dutch still life which I was repeating twelve times. He thought it was the most beautiful painting I had ever done, but why didn't I make it blue. We visited Lee and Jean on Staten Island, we did anything I could think of just to get through this horror. I had plans for him to return to his apartment on Friday, he was already on his second week.

He decided he would stay on. I didn't know who was crazy by this time. McKay had taken all the tranquilizers that his new doctor had given him and kept calling the doctor on emergency calls. It was some psychiatrist he had connected with at this mental clinic named Dr. Gardner. Thursday evening I was invited to a party somewhere on the East Side and in the Sixties, very far east and it was difficult to get to, so I didn't go by Frank's apartment and wanted to talk to him, so I telephoned him from a phone booth on the way to the party. I was frantic by then, but Frank couldn't tell me what to do, he was as frantic as I was. I did let Frank know I was going to send McKay back to his and Frank's apartment, that I was by no means a social worker, but I had no idea how I was going to do this. I don't remember the party, but I telephoned a friend and asked him if I could spend the night at his house.

By this time David Gamble was no longer living in Manhattan, he was the one who let me stay when I needed to be out of my loft when George Monk was throwing a party. I had a new David Gamble though whose name was Mike Helfgott. He lived at Gramercy Park and was real rich and worked in advertising. When I first met Mike I changed soap. Aunt Renie said Ivory soap was the best soap and that I should never worry if I used Ivory because it would take care of that sort of worry, but Mike thought Ivory was the worst soap and I began to worry about that sort of thing for the first time in my life. I should have listened to Aunt Renie. Mike was very nice about all this and told me McKay was certainly not my responsibility. I stayed at Mike's that Thursday night, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and went back on Monday. I was very frightened about doing this, but it was what I did anyway. I expected to find McKay's body in my loft, but he had merely returned to his apartment on Friday when he saw I was not returning very soon. Of course he was terribly worried about me.

Frank was moving, and now McKay had to find an apartment so I went with him and he got one, but he had no bed. One morning he came here to the loft and we carried an extra bed of mine to his new apartment at East Thirty-second Street on the subway. I believe, it was noticeably near Bellevue. Of course I had to help Frank and McKay move. I said I never helped people move anymore, but of course I do. Frank gave me a bottle of scotch for helping him move and McKay begged me if he could stay at my place one more night, so he could go into his place the following morning. He couldn't stand going there for the first night. I quickly thought, and told him I had a date that night and would be out, but he said it was alright. He was going straight to bed on his tranquilizers that Dr. Gardner had given him. When I got back to the loft that night half of my bottle of scotch had been drunk by McKay and he had passed out on scotch and tranquilizers. The next day I got him to his new apartment and much to my surprise and shock there was my old painting of Pamela Brown hanging on his wall. He said he would always carry it everywhere. he had had it at his other place, but I had forgot about it.

Of course McKay couldn't be bothered with Tom his cat and Mary Alice O'Neal was so insulted and I couldn't do anything. I did think of one thing to do and that was to throw out my other bed, which I did that night. I also vowed that I wouldn't ever be available for things like this again.

McKay was certainly having a mental breakdown. He had such a sharp mind and when he needed it, he could use it. He found his own apartment and it was good enough. He could call Dr. Gardner and get through any nurse, regardless how busy Dr. Gardner was, but on other situations he would just melt. Each day he telephoned me and would start the conversation with "I'm alright." I felt so bad for him, but who was going to finish my twelve repeats on my still life. Frank and I decided to send McKay home to his mother Lillie Rose.

Frank did it, but I had to close the apartment and get McKay to the plane. I don't remember how long he stayed in his new place, not more than a month. He tried to return to work, but he couldn't really manage it. When I cleaned out his apartment, a woman who taught with McKay helped. She was probably fifty years old, I had met her before. She helped McKay a great deal but was just as happy as I was to get him to his home in South Carolina. She asked me if she could buy Pamela Brown. I told her it was not mine, it was McKay's and she could certainly have it now that he had flown away. She said that I could certainly borrow it if ever I needed it for an exhibition. Well, if I ever exhibit any paintings I've done before I was twenty, I guess I'd use Pamela Brown.

It was sad and strange watching McKay board that plane for South Carolina. I had heard so many stories of people who just couldn't make it in New York. I had seen some leave, but I had never seen anyone leave so destroyed. When McKay got to his home, Lillie Rose decided she would have the family doctor take a look at her son. The results were signs of active tuberculosis. McKay was put into a sanitarium somewhere in South Carolina for at least a year and from what I hear there was no more mention about mental illness.

When I got out of the Army I hitchhiked to South Carolina to visit McKay and stayed at his home for a week. It was delightful to meet his parents, Lillie Rose and Marvin McTeer and I never thought of intruding on them, for as I recall, I was not invited, I just went. Now I wonder if I looked as strange to the McTeers as McKay looked as he got on the plane. Now his gabardine coat was replaced by a cardboard looking tweed. He still wore loafers and white socks but now he had a shiny suit. When he was born his head was so big that there was a necessity to use forceps and the scars are still there, if you know where to look. McKay was bobbing a bit as he walked and his huge eyes were glazed as though he didn't want to know where he was going. I finally saw that big head duck a bit in order to get under one of those doors that leads to the tube that leads to the plane. I just said goodby and now that I'm here in the loft with only one bed I naturally think about who is next to leave me, or whom I'm going to leave next.

That was a long time ago. I did see McKay again. He got rid of his TB and decided to try Manhattan again, but it didn't work. He got so involved with drinking he joined A.A. and I was wise enough to let him alone. He did have a party, a very strange party and invited old friends and served liquor, but he and his A.A. buddy laughed at our drinking. I drank too much and McKay started proving to me I needed A.A. I didn't see much of him during his stay of a few months and heard he returned to South Carolina alone one day.

The highlight of Jean Rigg and Lee Guilliatt living on Staten Island was my constant visiting them. They had a little bungalow that was covered with artificial brick siding and it was much too close to the ground, but it was near a beach and although the beach was filthy, there was something country and fresh about being there.

Staten Island is such a little village with countryside all around. Somehow I understood the concentration of Manhattan just because anything out of Manhattan is forgotten and little and neglected. This can only be noticed by people who are not born there. The natives of Staten island don't know to know. What I enjoyed the most was journeying on the Ferry alone then catching the local train that wound through the countryside, then I could get off and walk a half mile to Jean and Lee's along a paved road that had no sidewalks, but lovely private houses that reminded me of any small town. I couldn't see Manhattan from there.

Somehow it was difficult visiting at times. Lee had set herself up to paint. She had to saw off the top of her easel to get it to work on her front porch. She showed me her work each time I visited and I was impressed with her careful handling of paint when she did many paintings of the interior of the house and still lifes, which she was setting up herself. Sometimes there were echoes of what Larry O'Dwyer had said once when he asked me why I treated Lee like a star when we all knew she wasn't. I didn't know how to treat her, perhaps she was a star, I never got over treating her so, but realized that she was going to need to paint many years before she was to do any painting that would be worthwhile, and I knew this was just a season for her, what she was doing now, not what she really did. She didn't really do anything, and I kept hoping and wondering if she ever would.

It was noticeable that I was overraving and that is when I got to be very close with Jean Rigg. Jean was always in the other room, her little workroom, making lesson plans for her teaching. She would walk through where Lee and I were talking, smile and say things, but I could see in her ever-expressive eyes that there was nothing going on anywhere in her life, my life and Lee's. This doesn't mean that I could do anything about anything. Jean and Lee were as far as I was and we were waiting together for something to happen.

Times like that are pitiful and they happen all the time to most people and those people don't know where they are nor what to do.

Jean had a different autobiographical trail from Lee and me. She was from a completely different source, so different that she made Lee and me similar. She smoked Kool cigarettes and was always dressing in good blouses and skirts that were too long and taking things much slower than we took them. She had all the props of a teacher and could not always understand my staring at her when I saw her grading book, which was still red filled with blue horizontal lines and pink vertical lines like a ledger, with all the names of her students. The names belonged to fourth grade children, and regardless of the sound of their name, when they were listed in that book, they were all children's names. She had cut out colored drawings and those strange sheets of yellow lined paper all marked with patterns of children's thoughts, and stacks of wax crayon drawings that were delightful to see, but meant nothing, because they all looked like the situation Lee, Jean and I were in. Jean tried to run her bungalow. When two people live in a house there is one who knows when to grocery shop and when to answer bills at the right time. She did it very well, and that was one of the consolations of visiting there. Sometimes I would go there on Friday and leave on Monday morning. I wouldn't have accomplished anything, but found great comfort watching Jean arrange her things. She always carried many envelopes and loose leaf notebooks crammed with her collection. I'm sure she always will. When she visited me at the loft, there were her notebooks and envelopes, even during the summer when she worked in an office near Wall Street. The most impressive part about watching Jean was her unaltering consistency. I met all her friends mostly at the Staten Island home, and even if it were Aunt Clifford, Jean looked the same, her voice was the same, and so were the subjects she talked about. Lee and I changed our entire personality, or voices, our outlook on life each time we met someone. Most people do, but Jean doesn't and that is most of the excitement of being with her.

Marilyn Monroe died one weekend while I was on Staten Island. I painted a large multiple portrait of Lee while she lived on Staten Island. Lee got a dog whom she named Millie, but it didn't work out. I spent a lovely Christmas and an Easter there, but little else happened and near the end of their second summer the loft below me was free and Jean and Lee moved back to Manhattan, where Jean was cold most of the time.

That first year was delightful. We all had so many things to worry about we were always in good spirits. Tom the cat was adopted by Deborah and David Lee next door. Jean had her cat Dietrich, who was such a fighter a screen door had to be put on the fire escape where she screamed and crawled up the screen wire whenever she saw Tom Cat or Mary Alice O'Neal. This occupied all our cats and they were very pleased. Lee was building partitions in their loft, painting, making woodcuts, growing plants and making wonderful tea in a baked enamel white tea pot. I was house managing. I was seeing to shopping for food and suggesting improvements, painting and taking dance classes and performing. I was doing most of the cooking and found out a great deal about cooking fish fresh from the market. Every other night Lee and Jean came upstairs for dinner at my loft, but I cooked a great deal on their stove in their loft. Benny and Mary Ellen found a loft very near, and soon they were neighbors, and the situation was fitting together and running on its own power like the flue of a chimney.

Jean was still cold in the loft and Lee found ways to install a gas radiator. There was a man who looked like Boris Karloff who was a plumber. I had used his services years ago when I had an electric water heater installed in my loft. Somehow Mr. Holmes was friendly with us, and he found some very strange radiators that could be hooked up to a gas line. They were light and filled with water and became steam heaters. Mr. Holmes found a way to tap the gas line for us without our having to go through inspections and very soon our lofts had reliable heating sources. Lee and I spent a great deal of time standing around talking to Mr. Holmes and he told us wise old-man ways of seeing the world. At times he reminded me of Fred Rogers, my landlord in Chicago when I was first there who knew all those stories from prohibition days. Mr. Holmes was very hard of hearing but explained that away by telling us he could hear everything that was necessary. When you're an old man, he said, you no longer need to listen to what's going on because there is so little that is necessary to hear. However, when it's time to hear what's important you always hear it. "I can hear as well as anyone but I don't listen anymore and it's a good achievement which you will both learn when you are old." He told us the gas we burned in our heaters was odorless, but there was a garlic smell put in, so that people could detect a leak through smell. His smell sense was better than anybody's. He explained that he could move around very freely in dark places because he could smell where he was. He could do plumbing without light, I saw him connecting pipes in dark places without realizing he wasn't seeing what he was doing. His eyebrows were very long and he would not trim them because they protected his eyes so well and he said they were very necessary. He found a cooking stove for Lee that was white baked enamel like her tea pot and she always put them together. The stove was truly wonderful. It had high legs that kept the oven off the floor and beautiful iron grates to hold the cooking over the flame, and it had a black calligraphic line running around in places making patterns like fire engines have. I became so interested in the stove I began cooking upstairs and downstairs. I also made a rule that whoever cooks washes dishes too, so that when anyone has the night off from chores, they have no responsibility at all.

It isn't what people say that interests me, it's what people do and the things they have. I couldn't understand Jean's talking about the many things that Lee and I had been saying. Most of the things we ever said together were bombastic, full of oversized dreams that we collected from off the tops of our heads. We both were acting older than Jean and we had ways of telling lies together in front of one another just to keep the noise going. It kept us from really focusing in on one another because we really didn't want the real story of how tiny we were in Manhattan and how futile it all was really getting down to a seriousness. That kind of thing is for lovers and we were not lovers. Jean was a lover. She was in love with Lee and with me and was always frantic when she saw how we were doing nothing about one another but biding our time. We knew love and reality was for some other time, perhaps for someone else.

My only love was painting and that is where I focused and leveled with myself. I had my horrors and my depressions all on canvas, but the social noise in both lofts was always like a party. I enjoyed seeing Jean leave and come back. When she was away it was as exciting as her being there because of the things she did and the things she had and all those things were always around because she lived there.

Her articles from another time were carefully placed around in the loft, but one could see they were objects of identity that were not used anymore and they were dusty and had things thrown over them, but without them no one could have found Jean. There was a strange three-legged table that collapsed and the only way it could stand was by having a brass tray pressed into the bouquet of three legs. It was from India and held a dirty ashtray, some letters and usually a few pieces of jewelry which Jean wore on the occasion when she found them. The table was never cleaned and never looked at, but if it were moved, everything had been moved. She had a fish tank which she cared a great deal for and bought tiny worms in plastic cups to feed the two or three fish that died and were replaced often. It isn't that she wanted the fish so much as wanted to play in water and have an atmosphere of the sea bubbling in a big jar of clean water with clean bright colored shells at the bottom. I've seen fish tanks that had no fish, but were still kept filled with water, with a secret light and even a bubble machine going. Jean did have fish always. Sometimes a turtle, but the whole thing looked like her table from India after a while, but still never moved or forgotten. She smoked Kool cigarettes and went through many different styles of what to carry them in. Finally, after going through commercial plastic cigarette cases and strange dirty fabric cigarette purses that clicked when they were opened and clicked again when shut, she graduated to a tin Band-aid box, which I approved of with great delight. She found an ashtray that had a beanbag bottom, which would sit solidly anywhere. She was so fond of this ashtray she carried it up here to my loft often to flick ashes in, then would carry it back downstairs when she left. It was crusted with black cigarette tar, but she never seemed to notice that. Jean read a great deal, sitting sideways in a chair with her beanbag ashtray. The books she read were always uninteresting, yet she talked about them, but they were really about the things she thought of by herself. She had Mrs. Dalloway, but when she talked about it it sounded like a girl's book. She read Moby Dick, but I couldn't stop long enough to dip down into seeing what that was. I have since though. I was busy reading Proust and looking up and seeing everyone around me surrounded by their things. Lee was playing guitar and singing, and by this time was very good. She even had a few friends whom she visited with and they played guitars too. Jean was told that she was tone deaf, or whatever the term is for those people who can't remember a melody logically. I was always bothered by people like that and sort of decided not to associate with them too much. Bill Updike couldn't really remember a melody, so I decided our association wasn't musical. Jean was even worse, but her mind working toward singing a melody was one of the greatest delights I've ever experienced. She decided once that "Happy Days Are Here Again" was the best song to sing and think about. She sat sideways in her chair -- an upholstered arm chair that had a plain red overcover. She had her beanbag ash tray and she looked at the ceiling thinking about and singing happy days are here again for many afternoons and evenings. Lee and I would sit and watch in fascination because we could see her groping for the picture of the melody. She stopped, looked at Lee and Lee would sing it for her. Sometimes they would sing it together and Jean would have no trouble, but when she had to do it alone there would be trouble. I drew it for her. I've always been able to draw melodies, but that didn't help. People who cannot carry a tune just don't have the picture of what there is to do no matter how clearly it's explained. It doesn't mean they are without music. With Jean, it meant she was more musical than anyone I had ever known. I could see her and see how music was going through her senses, and learned all about the sensation of listening to music through Jean. She finally talked me into giving her my recording of Schoenberg's "Walpurgisnacht" and I gladly did because I had every reason then to sit and watch her hear it, so I could learn so much more about hearing. Jean Rigg is musical, and a master at hearing.

Lee was something I always knew. Jean said once that Lee smelled like milk, and I always wanted to have been the one who decided that. Whatever Lee put on she was still not colorful to see, but always like Indiana sand. Her voice and opinions were colorful, but easily faded because she had a new opinion each time it was opinion time. These opinions were not chosen, but came clearly from Lee's insides, but they were so varied and so personal that it was easy for me to turn down the volume and not hear her.

I've always envied Lee's hair. It's straight and fine and when it was clean it collected itself somewhat, obeyed the combing and parting, but jumped up and down whenever she moved. My hair is so curly it doesn't even blow in the wind, but just stays where it is, even when it's long. Lee always regretted my getting a hair cut because she always said I became grouchy. I've cut Lee's hair but could never do it well. I just couldn't understand what it wanted to do, or what I wanted to do with it, and when I got to Lee's neck I always lost all plans. The back of her neck frightened me and always made me a bit sad. The tender short hairs grew at the base of her head, but they never grew very long and were nearly white; not like old white hair, but like new thin tender hair that had never seen the sun. It was like baby hair. Then her neck was thin back there and very graceful and never seemed to know any of the things Lee did. Lee always went forward in one force, and never did anything about what was behind her. The back of her neck was so tender and delicate.

Lee didn't have things for me to look at when she wasn't there. She often let me have her notebooks to read, but I couldn't read them because they sounded just like mine when I had notebooks. These were spiral and they opened from the top and could bend all the way back like shorthand pads, I never liked that type of notebook, especially when they had pink lines. After Lee returned from Europe she had new pads that were very beautiful, and any friend of Lee's saw to it she would have a new supply if they went to Europe. After Lee got these notebooks she never left them for me to read. They opened from the side, were bound with stitching so that if you left them they closed by themselves. The lines were very close together, and sometimes there were vertical lines as well as horizontal lines, like graph paper. I suppose I would have read these notebooks had Lee insisted, but there was a beginning of something that had started between us. It had something to do with not being as intimate as we once had been. Our intimacy had come about through innocence and just as we had begun seeing it and finding it lovely, it suddenly vanished. It was like young children who know one day they should not go around naked anymore. When that happens no one can do anything about it, so when they do, and they always do, it expresses itself in the opposite way. Now any intimacy with Lee was stylized on both our parts and we both know that it's going to go away. It's no longer there already.

Lee's things were eyeglasses that were really clear glass that she wore to be someone in glasses. She told me that she had always enjoyed wearing glasses. I could only tell her that she didn't know what it was to wear glasses because she didn't need them, but she kept saying that i should enjoy them, the way she enjoyed them. When I told her I wore glasses in order to see and that she wore glasses in order to be seen, she pouted and acted as though I had taken something away from her.

I don't know anyone whom I like going to museums and art exhibitions with. I thought Lee was good, and indeed she has been the best so far, but once in a while she gets angry, the way one gets angry inside themselves and can't explain it, but Lee can be demonstrative enough to just be angry anyway and make the visit to an exhibition an uncomfortable event. It's very difficult to be angry alone, and when I go to an exhibition alone and get angry something else happens and I always see other things inside myself and am usually very delighted that the exhibition has been able to ruffle me up so much. I never go to exhibitions I know I won't enjoy, like a Tinguely or a surrealism exhibition, because they introduce things I don't like to think about. They never introduce things I have never thought about, like all the advertising promises. Any new type of exhibition gives off this promise but the exhibitions that give new thoughts are old exhibitions or exhibitions of old and familiar things. Once I went alone to a summer exhibition at the Metropolitan. They had some poor excuse for the exhibition like a summer storage of paintings while they air- conditioned the main galleries. I found these are always the best exhibitions to go to. All over Manhattan there are dull exhibitions in the summer. The Perls Gallery does some of the best. They have Soutine and his contemporaries, in which there is one questionable Soutine and five European painters that no one has ever seen before and it lets you see very closely just what Soutine isn't, and that's very important.  Well, this summer exhibition at the Metropolitan happened to have a full room of Rembrandt paintings. I'm sure Rembrandt never planned on such a thing as this, they were all alike, mostly the same size, most were those he painted because he didn't know anything else to do, and it was an exhibition where nothing happened on the walls, but everything happened to me. There was no sound from anybody there, just the patter of summer shoes, and museums supply lovely tile floors for the sticky sound of people walking. Everywhere in this big square room something was happening. I could see the air, the color of people passing by and the wonderful existence of Rembrandt all alone thinking those solid thoughts and being angry by himself, therefore painting instead of jogging, and being quiet knowing he was getting nowhere, but asking nowhere to go. Rembrandt painted all the time silently, without determination, usually a little angry, like one is on a damp hot day. He had a habit of turning a certain single volume again and again and that measures his life. I began a series of paintings that same day. It was to be a Joshua Reynolds smiling lady portrait, and I began by painting it twice, as similar to itself as possible, then another and another, until I had a big square room of the same painting, just like the Rembrandt exhibition, but before I had finished the first painting, I destroyed it because I found out a very important thing. If I were to ever have an exhibition showing the same painting over and over again like Rembrandt, it would have to be shown by someone who in time saw I had a collection of the same painting that I had done over and over again, because, in time, that is the way someone will see my painting.

Joan Schmidt was a girl who was too tall and had gone to the Art Institute of Chicago with me my first year. After I had returned to Chicago two years later, when I had finished being in the Army, I still saw her at the Art Institute, but she was not in any of my classes. I still knew her well enough that when she telephoned me here at the loft, I had no trouble remembering her. She could draw so well she should have become a drawer, I've never heard of an artist who only drew, but Joan Schmidt could be one. Aubrey Beardsley was a drawing artist but he illustrated in order to know it, Joan never illustrated when she drew. She couldn't paint, and I think it was because of the matter that paint is made of. It was unwieldy for her. She was masterful when she worked with pastel, so color was no problem. She sat sideways on the strange benches that drawing schools have and worked silently for hours. The only noise she made was in breathing. Her nose was clogged in some way all the time and it sounded that she was always about to blow a bubble. When she telephoned me one afternoon I was surprised to hear from her, I hadn't seen her for at least five years, and never thought about her for seven. It was nice to begin to think about her again. I liked her nose noises, I liked seeing her eyes water while she wore contact lenses. Her eyes watered anyway and once she wore white butterfly-shaped glasses that looked like they were made from bleached blow gum. The blow gum glasses were the best, but meeting her a few days later after she had telephoned and seeing she was trying to master the art of contact lenses was just as interesting. We went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw an exhibition of contemporary Spanish painting. Had it not been Joan Schmidt, I would have never gone. In those days any group show at the Museum of Modern Art was a reverie of abstract expressionism. This one was like a very comfortable dream that showed many different ways of getting to abstract expressionism and it was pleasant. Joan began snuffing a lot. She looked very good this evening, but when the snuffing began she began to get lots of liquid going and after we had got to the Cedar Bar, she took her contacts off and put on her blow gum glasses and began to tell me why she telephoned me. She drank some whiskey and water and smoked cigarettes. She smoked beautifully. Each cigarette seemed to be the best one, like the way they taste when there's a coffee break in the morning and the place where one works doesn't allow smoking in the workroom.

Joan began telling me about how frightened she was at the Spanish abstract expressionism exhibition. She said it had such an essence of death in it and she thought it was an attempt to insult us. I explained to her firmly that she had no idea what to do when going to an exhibition. That kind of emotion is not for someone like her, who drew so well and knew so much. Emotion like that was for Museum of Modern Art members. I even told her that she and I would not be going to painting exhibitions together anymore and I told her why and why I had again vowed to go to exhibitions alone. She sparkled and understood what i was saying and it was becoming a delightful visit because she started to tell me how I looked once years ago when I first had gone to Chicago from Vincennes and was living at the Wabash YMCA, but she never understood how serious I was about seeing exhibitions alone, so she told me how much I hadn't changed. It began to be a contest conversation and when she got a strong point going she would complete it, then stop. She was doing a finishing school date conversation: it was my time to start a new subject, but I was still talking about exhibitions. I told her about artists who only looked and did not paint and writers who only read, and how exhibitions were never set up for sincere aesthetic reasons and one could always find a disturbing flaw in them, but must learn right away to see what is there not what isn't there, then she took up the conversation again. She always had blond hair that was cut like a WAC, and although it had grown longer, it was wound up too much, so it began looking like an office girl who had been a WAC. I ate a hamburger. They are excellent at the Cedar Bar, not unlike the ones at Julius's, and this was before the Cedar Bar had been remodeled. Joan began talking about her sicknesses. She had always talked about her sicknesses, she had been to analysis for years, I guess she learned date talk through that, but another technique she got mixed up with was that habit that all patients in analysis get into: the story of their story of analysis. The only results of analysis that I can find is that it makes a person a patient, and those patients must let everyone know this in order to know they are in analysis. I knew it was time to go, but she insisted on telling about her secret horrors of eating flesh. This was really telling me she thought everyone should be a vegetarian. Again I explained that we should never go to an exhibition together again, that it happened again and again like this, people were always turning the exhibition into these visits, but Joan didn't understand that this had been an evening of seeing a not very successful exhibition of Contemporary Spanish Abstract Expressionism.

An exhibition cannot change a life. Having an exhibition cannot change a life. They are merely arrangements of popular images set up for the public to see. When they begin entering into the makeup of personalities they are no longer exhibitions, but only to those personalities.

My first one-man show was called "Nuts & Bolts." Allan arranged the whole thing and although I knew it was happening, and that I was sharing the gallery with a man named Nowack, I was not expecting an announcement in the mail all printed in black and red on white. It was mailed automatically, in that one side had Allan Stone's gallery address with my address printed in that strange registration that Addressographs do, and the other side had large and small printed names of artists in different type and arbitrarily placed all over the card. My name was upside down. It wasn't a two-man show, it was a group show. Group shows never mean anything, just like any group, a group art exhibition is specially uninteresting because no matter what the theme, no artist has ever thought of themes. I saw an exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries painting light and everyone who went were looking for the light, which, of course, was used so individually by Vermeer and his contemporaries that the exhibition wasn't about light at all, it wasn't even about Vermeer. "Nuts & Bolts" included some sculpture by a woman who had cast arrangements of huge bolts and nuts. Gerd Stern had some boxes that had lights going off and on in them and Mr. Nowack had boxes and bird cages filled with tiny plastic dolls and Cracker Jack prizes, then painted here and there in very bright colors. It was a poor man's Joseph Cornell. Later in my association with the Allan Stone Gallery, I noticed there was a Joseph Cornell show and I saw no more traces of Nowack. Among the hundred invitations I got to send out myself, most of them had no red registration, so they were just black and white. Naturally, my name was printed in red, so I saw what was happening: the invitations had all been mailed and my name was not on most. In those days this worried me a great deal.

It isn't to do with big time business or automation that makes me go under when I have an exhibition. I see that now. But then there was a terrifying power that undermined any advantage I could have had. When I had my second exhibition the following year, all the newspapers went on strike, and didn't print. The day my exhibition was finished the newspapers began again. Naturally all this was noticeable to me, and I began walking sideways or something equally as strange whenever the arrangements of an exhibition began.

I was performing dances all around Manhattan with small companies which didn't make much difference except to me, and that took care of some of my steam, but having an exhibition of painting still made me most frightened. The evening of the opening  of "Nuts & Bolts" I wore Gary Shaeffer's blue suit. This was my only suit, it had been stolen by Mary Ellen. Gary Schaeffer was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago at the time I was there, I only knew him when I saw him, but he stayed at Benny and Mary Ellen's and finally owed them some money. After a time Gary Schaeffer found an apartment and the Andrewses didn't see him, but the money owed was still to be paid back, so Mary Ellen went to his apartment and asked him for the money. When he refused to pay, she grabbed his blue suit and his best shoes and ran away. Benny wore the shoes, but would not wear the suit, because he's the type not to wear a suit. Mary Ellen gave me the suit because she said I was certainly the type to wear a suit. I think I wore the suit because Mary Ellen said I was the type to wear a suit. I am since then, but I didn't really know about wearing a suit to my exhibition, I had no way of knowing about something I had never done before. At least when performing a dance one is certainly told what to wear. If you don't have much beard and you're an artist, you can naturally get very interested in wearing a beard. Most artists I know who wear beards hardly have enough beard to even grow one, so they do. Then they can wear colored shirts and colored ties like art teachers. Art teachers think they are artists dressed up. Benny Andrews is an artist with a beard and has no beard to grow, but he's like he should be. I believe he was born with a beard. He has never been one to wear a suit or a tie so when he has an exhibition of his own to go to, he just walks out the door. I had my tie and my suit, and no time to grow a beard, so I had to go as the type to wear a suit. Uncle Can never wore a suit, he never owned one, I think he borrowed one when he married Aunt Hootie. He always wore denim overalls with a long denim jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth hat, the type that men who work on trains wear. Uncle Can never took his coat nor hat off when he came to our house, and he sat there with us in a warm room smelling like liver and smoke. When I found him without a hat on, it was the day Aunt Hootie went to the hospital.

My tie was from a thrift shop. Thrift shops in Manhattan are not for thrifty people, but for people of means who like finding articles that Bloomingdale's can't carry. Thrift shops are usually very expensive. I didn't pay much for my tie and it was a bit wider than the usual striped ties that were popular everywhere. It was a war tie: dark blue with white polka dots. I think polka dots on a tie is about the best thing a tie can have. Bill Updike always hated polka dots because they didn't do anything, and that's why I like them. Any design idea that doesn't do anything is the essence of design. Once I had a polka dot tie, it was dark blue and the polka dots had been silk-screened on. After some tying and retying, some of the paint shelled off and there were tracks of old white paint left in where real spots had been. Dotted swiss is one of the best polka dot uses where dots are woven into the texture of the transparent material. If I had the silk-screened polka dot tie to wear to my first opening, I wouldn't have worn it because at that time I was still putting on what I wore, not wearing it. I could have put on anything and gone to my first exhibition because nobody could see me then anyway.

So, I wore Gary Schaeffer's blue suit, my blue tie with white polka dots. The tie had been ironed, but I soaked it in naphtha and stuffed it with a piece of cardboard and it got its shape back, even though the knot could never really be fresh again.

Allan Stone's Gallery was at Eighty-sixth Street, upstairs on the corner of Madison Avenue. He had moved from Eighty-second Street that year and the exhibition space was large and there was a wall that partially divided it into two rooms. My paintings were hung in the inner room and Mr. Nowack's work was in the room where the Gallery has its entrance. When I got there people were still on the ladders hanging pieces in the hall. My paintings had been already hung and my section was finished, so I went in there and began to stand. I felt like I had a booth at an art fair. I had never been in this kind of situation before. Allan Stone never served cocktails at openings so I could have a drink, and that was best, or I would have drunk too much. Before I got on the subway to go to the Gallery I went into Wieth's Restaurant, the grand Tudor-looking restaurant that's near the corner of Fulton and Broadway, and I had a martini. Wieth's was a place I had always wanted to go to, but it was too expensive, but this evening I could have a cocktail there, I thought I looked like the Wall Street office workers. I got there about fifteen minutes before cocktail time, so had my martini alone at the bar and watched the bartender put on his apron, arrange bottles and slice lemons, and it wasn't the atmosphere I had hoped for.

I should have gone to the bar that was beyond Gold Street towards the fish markets. It was the best bar and the old German bartender made the best martinis. They were served in cone-shaped glasses with long stems, but the cone part was bigger than usual. They were as big as the glasses used at The Four Seasons bar. I had been to the Four Seasons with George Monk once, but didn't like it, because I felt I was looking down into a boat. Jimmie's was the name of the bar where the old German man was and he had a hearing aid. He mixed the martinis in a proper stainless steel mixer, served the glass, then poured it and waited for me to take the first sip, then would fill the glass again because he always made a bit more than the glass held. I did the same thing when I made milkshakes in Walgreens when I worked there in Chicago. A bar should always have a mirrored back with lots of decorations and bottles for the customer to look at. That way no one can see the floor where the bartender stands and works. Jimmie's had all of this, it was similar to the illusion that Manet painted when he painted the Bar at the Folies-Bergere. There are two kinds of martinis, gin and vodka. Gin is for Christmas and on until Lent and vodka is for Easter and on until Fall. The bartender made each perfectly because they were so well blended there was no taste until after the first sips had been swallowed. At Wieth's they were in heavy stemless glasses and the blend was not what I expected and there is nothing so uncomfortable as a bad martini. I had gone to the wrong bar and it started off a very uncomfortable evening.

Allan Stone was in his work clothes. The ones he wore when hanging an exhibition. I thought he would disappear and return in his usual large striped tie and general suit, but he didn't, he just stayed around helping put away ladders and tools and people began to arrive. I kept looking at him thinking he was watching me and seeing I was in a suit and looking like I was afraid. He talked to me and suggested that he was planning to buy some of my work, then would go away and talk to some other people. I couldn't talk to him very well, I don't think I ever did. I began to feel like I felt in the days Dad and I would go to Vincennes in the morning during the week. Dad usually enjoyed my going with him, and after he had completed his business, we usually went to the Pool Room, it was next door to the bank. Once upon a time it sold beer and minors were not allowed, but that was when I was very young and it wasn't unusual for a child to be there with his father. When my twin brother was alive we went there often and someone always gave us each a dime. Since the time the Pool Room decided to no longer sell beer, it got to be a place where young men went to play pool and visit with friends even without their fathers. It was never the type of bar that Jimmie's on Fulton Street was, and when it was no longer a bar, it still looked the same. As you walked in, on the right was a long bar with high stools and on the left another bar, but it had no stools and the old man behind it sold tobacco and every accessory that went with smoking. This division even continued even in the window display that could be seen from the street. It was a small typical store front with the door in the center of two full length glass windows. One side had a display of cokes or at this special time, Canada Dry. The other window had cigarette lighters and very beautiful posters of women and movie stars smoking. The owner of the place was the old man who sold tobacco and he was always glad to see Dad, and by his cash register was a small gas pipe that always had a protected flame burning, and it was common for smokers to light their cigars or cigarettes on this flame while talking to the old man. Once when Dad and I were there I had a cherry coke and he had a lemon coke and we laughed, because we knew about these strange coke mixtures that the poolroom invented. Later that day I threw up because the cherry coke was so vile. I've never minded throwing up, but do find the moments before awful, so when I was able to walk around Vincennes alone I never went into the pool room but once by myself. I just had to go in and see if it were really the way I had thought, so the summer I spent in Vincennes after I was out of the Army I went to the Pool Room alone. It had not changed and I was curious about the pool playing section that was at the back of the huge long room. The pool tables were set across the room on the far side of the two bars. All pool halls are alike, filled with smoke with magic lights well shaded, hanging low over the green felt covered tables. I had a notion to get sick again because the air and smell was so unpleasant to me, but since I had crossed the ocean on a troop ship and returned, I found out how not to be sick, even if everything was nauseating. I stayed for a long time watching the men playing pool, seeing young men come in all excited to be there, waving to others they knew and all learning how not to be sick. Everyone learns how not to be sick.

Steve Antonakos reminds me of me, although he's shorter and darker. He wears glasses and although he has a brave black beard he has something in his eyes that is like me. Steve was exhibiting with "Nuts and Bolts" too, he had some pillows that had the word dream stencilled on them, and closed umbrellas that were covered with buttons, all sewed neatly everywhere, even on the handles. We had met here before the exhibition and i was pleased to know Steve because he could talk to Allan Stone just like he could talk to me, and I could see that he learned about all this by working very hard at it, that was one thing I could see in his eyes. Lou Skori had the same look when he looked at me. Lou Skori made canvas stretchers that wouldn't warp. I finally ordered my stretchers from him because the ones I made were simply not adequate. Both Steve Antonakos and Lou Skori had done something in their lives that made them no longer like me, but once they were like me. I still don't know what it was, but I enjoyed knowing both of them and they told me many things. Lou Skori was not at the exhibition, I didn't know him yet, but Steve was, and he talked to everyone and had a calm seriousness that an undertaker has. Undertakers are marvelous secure people to talk to when there are no deaths to talk about. Steve kept pointing out Mr. Nowack, but each time I could locate him he would have moved and I never did find out which man Mr. Nowack was. Steve told me he was very proud to be in an exhibit with me. He said he had not seen such good painting in a long time. I told him that I certainly liked his umbrellas that were covered with buttons and I did. I have always liked umbrellas covered with buttons since then and enjoy thinking about them still.

From that time on, it was always a great pleasure seeing Steve Antonakos at exhibits and he kept telling me many things, but I still can't figure out how he can walk around and talk to everybody like a very healthy undertaker who doesn't need to be talking about death, yet reminds me of me.

He was the first person I talked to after I had talked to Allan Stone, then I saw Marshall Klugman and Marty Levy walk into the gallery. They were with other people I knew because there was a sudden cloud of friendship that took me over and I knew I was finished being alone. Marshall said, "Sis." He went to school with me in Chicago and knew McKay, Dick Lee and all my Chicago world, had been born in Chicago and had a loud Chicago accent. Marshall had studied dress design and was doing very well in New York. When McKay was in grade school he was called Miss Lynwood. Richard Smith was called Sister Smith, I was called Sissy Deem and once we were with Marshall and we told this story. He was so amused that he always called me Sis after this. He never told me what he was called. He had a suit on, and his hair was well groomed and it was a pleasure having him come to the opening of my exhibition. Marty Levy was in a suit too. At that time it was necessary to have a razor haircut if you wore a suit and if you were Marty Levy. Marty was very excited with the natural shoulder cut of a suit  and it was strange because Marty hardly had any shoulders and the combination should not have worked, but it did very handsomely and Marty said, "Kid." That came from Chicago days too. It was nice to hear that word because I used to say it when I was excited but I never say it anymore. Marty Levy looked at me for a long time, then told me congratulations. Marty has something of an old man quality in him and has ways of saying very public and general things which come out being completely real, like Protestant hymns. He insisted on walking around the exhibition with me and catching his breath upon seeing certain paintings and knowing what they were about. He even noticed painting habits which he said I had always used. In Chicago I had painted his portrait. It was a skinny painting and I tried very hard to have it look like the portraits in Portraits Inc. advertisements, and it did. He had commissioned me to do a small composition in those days too, and although I don't know where these paintings are now, he still reminds me of them with a smile, and yet with some pride.

Marshall was talking to Mike Helfgott when Marty and I were finished walking around the room. Mike said, "You are well hung," but he was very worried about the other articles in the exhibition that were not mine, and he talked only of my latest copies of Degas that were not in this exhibition. He always talks of things that aren't there. Once, when I first met Mike he bought a lovely calligraphic drawing of mine and had it framed by Kulicke and it hung in his apartment and I was very proud because his apartment was one of the most beautiful apartments I had ever seen. He was able to have things in his apartment which he didn't use. That is the essence of an apartment. He had an iron table that was painted beige. It had one-inch square legs and the table top was a rectangular piece of pitted marble. On this table there sat an empty Chinese bowl that was very large. Nothing ever happened on this table and the bowl was never moved and it was always clean. I would have had a key or a marble in it. The table was near the entrance of his apartment and it was there for passing by. There was even two beautiful carved chairs on either side which were not used. I once told him that it would be very nice if the upholstered seats were removed from the chairs so they could sit there like carvings and he understood that and enjoyed that, but didn't remove the seats. I told him that one day when I visited him and we spent hours removing all the labels out of his jackets, which I enjoyed very much.

Mike gave the drawing he bought from me to some friends of his, and told me he still liked it, but the paper had not been stretched properly by me and the framer could not stretch it to be flat and that was how he lost his interest in it. When paper warps like that it really doesn't bother me, but Mike kept asking me to pay attention to warped paper and not have it happen anymore. I still don't stretch paper and it doesn't warp anymore.

When I met Mike Helfgott he told me his name was Mike, but I heard his friends call him Myron. I met a man named Jim Fisk once and I went to a party he gave and his friends called him Allan. I asked Jim if his name was Allan and he said, " To you I am Jim, but to my friends I am Allan," so I continued calling him Jim and continued calling Mike Mike.

Mike was a hero to a small group of rather withered Jewish boys. It seems to me that all of them must have grown up together and Mike had always been the tallest and the one who had to be there in order to make their group work. Whenever I met Mike's friends without Mike they always looked like they were waiting for him. For a time I joined the Jewish boys and Mike became my hero too. I needed a hero then and once in a while, when it was possible to be alone with Mike, he focused on me and would talk to me and ask me things. He was forty and this always made me condition myself to be at my best. I felt like I was in the presence of a priest. It was like being with Father Barthelamo, a priest I had met at St. Meinrad's, when I was an Oblate. Fr. Barthelamo looked like a movie star and was a Greek scholar and once in a while he saw me, recognized me and focused in on me and I would tell him anything he wanted to know. Now it was slightly different; Mike wasn't a Greek scholar, although he was scholarly, but the difference was I told him everything I wanted him to know, but not everything. When you have your hero at last, you see to it that you keep it on the hero level, so naturally it wears away and the hero must finally ride away. So it all finally became silly when I saw I was my own hero.

I guess I saw Mike often for a bit more than a year, at least on Thursday evenings after dance class. I was taking class each weeknight from Paul Sanasardo and after class on Thursday I went to Mike's and we went out to dinner. He never ate at home, but always out and that surprised me because it made his home into something that was not a home. A home is where you eat and sleep. Yet he was my hero, he was so accomplished, so educated and certainly could talk and talk and it was fascinating. He gave me a champagne party for my exhibition and invited his friends and hung my copies of the Degas painting in his apartment. I invited Lee and Jean, Verdalee, and the New York Times critic John Canaday. Everyone whom I invited came except John Canaday. I didn't know him, but thought he might go to Mike's apartment then see my Degas. The Degas was a double copy of "Racing Day" on one canvas with a large white border. It was a nice party although Lee drank too much champagne and said the only person there whom she really liked was the Negro maid who served the champagne, Mike's cleaning woman. I was surprised to find Lee still so childlike and precious and still seeking answers as though she was in lower school. Of course Lee was right, the nicest person at the party was the Negro woman, but niceness doesn't go to parties. She finally lay on the bed and began explaining she was just too tired to leave when it was time to leave. I had planned to have dinner with Mike that evening, so would not allow her to stay. I could see her looking at me and her eyes became like turtle's eyes and they said, "now just how are you going to get me out?" It was important for all the guests to leave at a certain time, how could anyone enjoy having had a party if the guests don't leave, so the party can become understood? I don't know how I got rid of Lee, but I did; I always get my way, but the shock came when i went to dinner with Mike and he took his two buddies with us. I knew how to get rid of Lee, but Mike didn't know how to get rid of me and we never did review the party correctly.

I remember I didn't drink the champagne at the champagne party, but I drank bourbon. Bourbon makes you see darkly and puts a shadow of heavy strength that goes right down your back. You can see very well in the sun when drinking bourbon. Champagne makes you see up and down at the same time, like when swimming you can put your eyes level with the water and see two ways at once, like a frog. Scotch makes you wider. Gin is like drinking glass and it can shatter and it makes you be very careful until you are stupid. Vodka is very thin like thread, but many threads and they are so thin and fragile they disintegrate when looked for, but you know they get back together as soon as the vodka is not seen and they pull you into different shapes. Each one of these drinks makes lovely sensations and can be dealt with time and time again.

Benny Andrews said he would go to my opening early before all the people with suits got there, and he had been there and gone and it was he whom I wanted to see seeing my exhibition. It's very necessary for me to see Benny at different places at different times because his presence gives me such a position to view from. Benny has been the way he is ever since he began and anyone who sees him can see if anything is a mirage or not. He told me what he saw at my exhibition and liked a certain small painting which was the first painting called "Paragraph with Illustration" and I gave it to him a year later and he gave me a painting called "Night" and it is a big buzzard in the moonlight.

At about this time Lee and Jean appeared. They had driven into Manhattan from Staten Island. This first exhibition happened before they moved into the loft below me. Lee explained they were not going to be able to stay very long and what a terrible time they had had driving all the way from Staten Island. She gave me a sincere smile, but I could see that it had been much more fun before any exhibition had been planned when I was filled with dreams and fabulous ideas. She saw the same look in my eyes too, because nothing is really like it should have been. Jean was in her velvet blue dress that looked like it had been cut down from a formal and she talked with me with her eyes closed, when I did see her looking at me she had that look Aunt Renie had when she visited me at the monastery when I was an Oblate, both Jean and Aunt Renie were saying, "Oh, this is what you wanted, are you sure this is what you wanted?" and they both talked on about how they found it so difficult being there. After all, it was happening during a time when they were both busy and happened to live so far away. Jean does have lesson plans to finish and next Monday is Parents Day. These things were explained with quiet efficiency not because they were telling me of all the trouble I was causing, it was the only thing they could talk about to me at a public opening. The morning I went to the Army, Dad and Aunt Renie sat at the breakfast table with me and talked to one another about the watermelon season and old lady Horsting who lived across the street who couldn't get welfare unless Aunt Renie talked to a proper authority. It was their way of spending their last moments with me, knowing nothing was going to be the same after that morning. It's the only way to do it that I know, so Lee and Jean did more at my opening than anyone else.

It was like going away to the Army because after that I was not the same. It didn't put me into strange positions concerning my next exhibition, even though I could see there were certain parts of paintings I didn't need to concern myself with anymore. It was simply the fact that I had had an exhibition and was no longer the way i was. I could not see what I had painted, not during the opening, nor at the times I went to the gallery to try and see it, I knew what I had painted, but seeing it was necessary too. During openings people look at the paintings then look at me as if they will understand something more. I've tried to explain to certain people what i was doing, but it always sounds like the paragraphs on the back of a record album. I seldom read such things because it never has anything to do with hearing the record. The act of painting has to do with the contact of the artist with paint on canvas, but when that contact is completed there is no way to go back to it, and an exhibition with an opening only puts the contact farther away. It is always best to have an exhibition and not be there, but at this time I believed there were certain procedures one had to perform, and that indeed was true then, or I wouldn't have gone to my openings again and again until I learned all this.

At Allan Stone's party I was surprised to see many artists whom I had heard of: Barnett Newman, Robert Mallary, and others whom I have forgotten about. I thought I would remember all of them, but I can't do that like many people can. The surprising thing was that none of the artists were having any kind of good time. They were all sitting around making party noises, some were dancing with the women that are always dominant at these kinds of parties. Most of them didn't know how to eat publicly, especially at a buffet, though I found that the easiest part, and after a while i was dancing and feeling much better because the artists were all beginning to look as misplaced as I thought I had. Steve Antonakos was finished walking around talking, he had to stop sometime, and I saw that it must be terrible to be an artist and not be able to paint.

Somehow it has become stylish to be an artist who can't paint. It started with Duchamp and he didn't paint very well. So well that he did all his creative things until he was able to knock painting into its own category, a category that could never have been thought of until after Duchamp. John Cage is a musician who can't do harmony, so arranges for the world to find that harmony is one thing that can be put somewhere while music can go on without it. Everything can go on very well by itself now with no dependence on units. This is what happened to painting and now of course painting is better off than ever because it is not necessary. Most artists are going to be a bit sideways for a long time now, because they will be thinking of how to be an artist without painting.

I was so glad to get home and the next morning I bought a staple gun and decided I no longer needed to use tacks to hold canvas on stretchers, I can use staples. The canvases looked strange at first, I missed the traces of tacks that once peeped around the edge of the canvas. They were like eyelashes. Now, however, I was painting all the time now and my canvas had to look like canvases just like my paintings looked like paintings, or no one would know what I was doing.

Now I'm back in bed propped up against the wall with many pillows. The two windows on my back wall are on either side and they are open and if any of the factory workers across the roof can see in, they can't see me. Mary Alice O'Neal is here on the bed with me. She doesn't bother me, she lies on the bed when I do and must touch me somewhere as she sleeps. I can move all I want, I don't bother her except she rearranges herself so that she can touch me and go back to sleep. She's usually at the foot of the bed and when I'm covered she doesn't let the covers bother her, she knows which lump is me.

She knows also that I'm going to have to move. I would rather stay here with her but recently the city has taken over this building. I have paid one month's rent to them, but I don't understand the city being my landlord. I know this building is scheduled to be torn down and a big housing project is to be built on this site. They won't call it Deem Apartments like they have named other apartment buildings. There is the Van Gogh, the Rembrandt, the Vermeer. The Vermeer has a huge photograph of Vermeer's "Artist in his Studio" in the entrance. It's so big it takes up an entire wall. It is a cheap blowup and the color is faded down like the image because of making it so large. When a colored photograph is blown up, any black line gets fuzzy and gray and the color does the same and it all has so much to do with nowadays that nobody seems to notice such a difference. It's like knowing something for so long that it isn't any longer the way it was when it was first thought about.

I've had two exhibitions now and another is scheduled for February, but I will have moved by then. There is no point in worrying about moving and rearranging first thoughts when I awaken. I have lived here five years and when I wake up I know all about the air and space I'm in without thinking about it. In just a few weeks I'll be waking up in another situation and will be forced to reconstruct where I am.

 

End of Part Eleven

End of There's a Cow in Manhattan