In his book Homo Ludens Johan Huizinga traces the history of man-at-play. Egyptians built pyramids, not as homes, but as tombs for the dead, filled with their possessions, even games, for the afterlife. The Greeks changed all that bringing in official games to play, “real” games like the Olympics, often played in the nude, in huge stadiums, running from city to city, inventing the marathon. Now, we have professional football. Man-at-play. 

Hide-and-seek

I love games. Played them all my life. The first game I ever played was hide-and-seek. Once my older brother and a friend put on white sheets at night and scared the hell out of me acting as ghosts. When I was five years old living in Strasbourg, I saw animals at play. Look at cats, even dogs, and how they tease each other. 

Card games

I played whist, which is a bit like bridge but without the bidding. To this day I am fascinated by playing cards and I buy them whenever I see them, such as a deck I bought from the Magritte Museum in Brussels. The backs showed his painting of a pipe and said underneath: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. Most recently, I bought a deck of Tarot cards from the House of Fournier, a beautiful rendering of the very old Marseille deck. 

I like doing tricks with cards, some sleight of hand, baffling people by the act of having them point to cards that I name, and then show back to them. Tarot cards came later. Not to play, unless laying out an Arcana, a pattern like a cross, is a sort of game about life and death. The Tarot is considered a book of life and can tell about one’s past, present and future. Like astrology. I love the visual aspects of Tarot. You can use a guide to read Tarot, but it is best to use your own intuition.

I prefer the old classic Marseille deck and the deck Napoleon used. In the Dark Ages, it was primal stuff. Like astronomy. Of course, now it does not make sense, unless one believes in the metaphysical world and that the position of Mars or Venus has an effect on us. Yet there is something to be said for chance. Carl Jung believed in a collective unconscious, which we could tap into with a roll of the dice. John Cage, the composer, used dice to compose notes. He claimed that Mozart did the same. Jung used the I Ching, the book of changes — another game of sorts which analyzes the present and the future.  

I am a skeptic but sometimes things happen that seem incredible. The night John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, a friend of mine, who lived on Avenue C and 14th Street, threw coins to find a hexagram. There is a version with yarrow stalks grown near where Confucius is buried. Well, we could not find those in New York, so we used the three coins system. Three tails is ying, a broken line, and three heads is yang, a solid line. The line starts at the bottom and works up to six lines. By doing these numbers, three times we came up with a hexagram from one to 64. That night we got hexagram 36: Darkening of the light, earth over fire. The Interpretations read: “He penetrates the left side of his belly. Injure him on his left thigh”, where Governor Connolly was injured. Also “During the hunt down south”, which was where Kennedy had just traveled. And finally “Their great leader is captured. Then he plunged into the depth of the earth.” We freaked out. I am a skeptic through and through, but that really baffled me. Of course, my friend was a true believer and he was not surprised reading these actual lines from the ancient text. 

Mah-jong

When I was hiding with a family in a chateau in Nederrockerzeel, in Flemish Belgium, during World War II, the family I hid with, the Luyckx, knew someone who had married the chateau owner. Mr. Wittman, the owner, agreed to allow me to move in with them, even though he knew I was Jewish and hiding there. He was willing to take a risk. Mr. Wittman recently was posthumously awarded the Yad Vashem Medal of Honor as one of the “Righteous Amongst the Nations”, i.e., those who took chances and risked their lives to hide Jews. I wandered around the chateau with another boy from the Luyckx family I was hiding with, named Jean. We would get scared when we passed armored mannequins standing in the halls as if they were alive and ready to strike. We peeked into a huge room, the kind that appears in dreams, filled with numerous arm chairs and small tables and a huge fireplace. At the very far end, four people, the Luyckx and the Wittmans, were playing a game at a table. We saw the Chinese ivory tiles laid out on the table. It was mah-jong. They were dressed elegantly and sipping liqueurs. I always thought it was an elegant game, not the kind that is played nowadays in Miami with Jewish ladies kvetching about everything or in Maine, where I live now, played by older women out for blood. 

I never really understood mah-jong. Recently I took a course at a local Jewish community center. I am not sure why Jewish women love the game so much. In time, I began to understand the tiles, with their Chinese characters or symbols, but I am still slow in figuring out what to aim for. I own a Chinese set. Many Americans have a version with jokers and numbers visible on the tile so you do not have to interpret the Chinese characters. A dumbed-down version. Once a year you have to get a card from the Mah-Jong League, which lays out the combinations that are allowed for that particular year. It is like playing gin rummy or poker: obtain a run of cards in a sequence. If your seven tiles are lined up, it is mah-jong and you win the round. 

I do not like the strictures of the American rules. The goal to make it simpler but it just keeps you restrained. After the course at the Jewish Center, I went to a place that featured games held for small bets of 25 cents per game every afternoon. The first time I played I was soon asked to sit on the side after a couple of rounds and just watch. I was way too slow for them. In other words, I was kicked out. To me it was like a chess game and I needed time to figure out what to go for. I told someone about my banishment and she said to me: “Oh!, you mean playing mah-jong with the sharks!”

Go

The Japanese game Go is another favorite of mine. It is almost like Zen. You play with black and white stones that you lay down on a board with 19×19 lines on the intersection. All pieces have the same value. Once down, they stay put. If you surround pieces or many pieces, an army, you capture them and take them off the board like prisoners. The player with the most pieces and the most territory, or space, wins the game, even if only by one stone or one intersection. All pieces have the same value, but it is in the way that you use them, sometimes in groups, that determines whether you win or lose. In a sense the stones are like samurai. I learned the basic moves yet I play by instinct. I do not have the patience to study the game in books. 

In Go, you start by winning the four corners one at a time, and eventually they influence each other. Much like modern warfare, you have multiple wars. In Go, like chess, you get a ranking, in this case from one to nine. One, Go Dan, is the highest and black always plays first. It is a handicapped game so that no matter what, you lose or win within 10 points. For each point you get a stone and you try to remain as close in score to the other player as possible. It is amazing how this always works out. In chess, there is no handicap, just a rating determined by how many games you win or lose against other rated players. In Go, played at its best, you get nine stones and they are placed in all the best places, the four corners and all the sides.

Poker

Poker is another story. Knowing the odds of getting the right card is key. Bluffing is the next best thing: letting people think you have the high hand even though you have a losing hand. Or if you have a winning hand make others think you have nothing. Hence the poker face. Playing at the office, I once had a seven of spades in my hand. Beforehand it was decided that having this card alone would win the game. I asked out loud if the seven wins it all. And they said yes. I thanked them all. And they did not know what to think. Am I that naive, or am I bluffing?

I won that hand after heavy betting, at first quarters and then dollars and before you knew it there was a pot of a hundred dollars, high stakes for an office game. After I won, they were hip to my bluffing. We played after work at someone’s apartment and ordered pizzas and we stayed up until dawn. I ended up twenty dollars ahead, exhausted, from pizzas, beer, and cigarettes. It showed me what it must be like to live in Las Vegas and earn your rent each week through gambling. I could not do it.

That said, my father gambled, so I have to be careful. Gambling can be contagious and addictive. I realize that even when I play small poker games. My father used to take us to horse races. Most of the time he would lose and you could not talk to him. Once my brother confronted him and my father hit him and threw us both out of the apartment. 

Computer Games

I am not into computer games, the kind that are hypnotic and you cannot stop playing. Truth be told, I do play cards games, like solitaire, on the computer. I get hooked for hours and it relaxes me. When my son Adam was a year old, I used to put him on my knees and we would sit in front of a computer and play Zork. There were no visual effects then, it was all text based. Zork takes place in an underground world and your task is to find things and collect them and put them in a vault until you had them all. A thief would appear, that was the catch, and he would steal what you had and disappear. Yet things were not hopeless because the idea was to catch the thief at the end and kill him and retake everything. Some objects had special functions that you had to figure out. For example, if you found a brick, what do you do? It turns out, if thrown, it becomes a bomb and comes in handy when the thief appears out of nowhere. 

Playing Zork there was a bonding between my son and the game, even at that young age we would work things out together and to this day, he is thirty four now, we talk about Zork. Another game we played was Mad Marble. I had rigged up a huge television, a gift from someone, to my hi-fi system. An early version of television surround sound. With a remote control, my son and I had to balance marbles along a tenuous ramp all the way to the bottom. If they fell off along the way, you lost the round. Another important bonding experience. 

Chess

After World War II, I was reunited with Jewish communities, who during the war were concerned that the hidden children would disappear: first in the death camps, and then by means of Catholic conversion. I ended up in a group home in Schaarbeek, outside of Brussels, when I turned twelve. Everyone was older than I, and before I knew it, I was reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and playing chess, which my brother taught me. I have been playing ever since. Today, I play chess online on Chessworld.com under the username jeblague, which means, “I’m joking”, in French. I play an average of about thirty games at once, but you can only make one move at a time and you have up to ten days to make each move, thus a game can last months. Unlike chess, in mah-jong, you must think and move fast. Eventually in playing chess online, you get a rating, but not an official one, like from The United State Chess Federation (USCF), the official American chess organization, although I also play the occasional tournament with USCF for an official rating.

Chess is a mystifying game. The aim, as I understand it, is to first control the four central squares. So all openings seek such control. There are books on openings and whatever you do there is a name for it, usually by the first grandmaster who tried that variation or line of play. 

I also play a computer program called Fritz, which I cannot beat. I was told many times that you learn best when you play a stronger player. You need to win against stronger players in order to advance in skill level. I love chess and sometimes it is amazing how intricate it gets, full of beautiful combinations.

That said, I do not like checkers. In my opinion, the first person to play usually wins. Still there are major tournaments in checkers and major world champs. In chess, the current world champion is Magus Carlsen, a young Scandinavian man that no one can beat. In his last tournament held in India, I watched all the games live and got up at three in the morning to follow the moves. All the games were very close, played with no new concepts, yet Carlsen prevailed when the other player blundered.

 A great book to read is Chess Story (also known as The Royal Game) by the Viennese writer, Stefan Zweig. It is about a man who was imprisoned who, one day on his way to court, saw a book in a raincoat pocket and grabbed it. The book turned out to be about the hundred best chess games of the century. He took it back to his cell and started to play each game using bread crumbs on his checkered blanket. Eventually he knew all the moves by heart. When he is released, he becomes obsessed with chess, but cannot play it in real time because he has no patience to wait for the opponent to move. A fascinating book.

I feel chess keeps my brain active and grows new cells. I play at tournaments and once I played a child of eight, a girl who was so intent on the game, she complained to the person in charge that I was distracting her when I took photographs of her playing. I managed to take a photo of her mad at me. She easily beat me. Of course, her brain was new and hardly used.  

Our chess club is very small, maybe ten members, and now it meets in the bowels of a hospital, on the second level basement, in a room usually used to teach doctors about special procedures. In the evening when we meet, we have to go through the rear entrance, the emergency entrance actually, and walk through long desolate corridors all the way to the front and then take an elevator down two levels. I hate going there now.  

Just the other night I was feeling deeply depressed by world news: Isis killing Christians who do not want to convert to Islam (shades of the Inquisition when converting Jews); Robin Williams committing suicide; Israel and Palestine at constant war with the innocent getting killed; a young black youth shot by an over-zealous white policeman in Ferguson; the Paris massacre of Hebdo cartoonists. The list goes on and on. I thought a night of chess would bring me out of the abyss. I walked down those long corridors into the room and no one was there. It was early, so I asked the janitor to unlock the door. Finally one chess player showed up and we played a game, a good game, which I lost. Then from next door another player came over. We did not know about this other room. I ended playing a game with someone there I never met before. A good game too, close right to the end, which again I lost. 

Yet after that game I decided to go home. I was still depressed and swore I would never go there again. I do not mind the Sunday meetings in a bagel shop, in the sunlight, with offers of food, but these hospital rooms are depressing indeed. You do not play to win. You play for a good experience and usually it is.

I used to play chess in Washington Square sometimes to two o’clock in the morning. The cubist/dada artist Marcel Duchamp used to play there. Duchamp was also a chess lover and incorporated chess into his paintings. For centuries chess has fascinated artists and philosophers, as an example of the human condition and of warfare. Go is more modern, displaying many fronts at once. Once at a Japanese business club in New York City, I played Go with an advanced player. A huge hole on the board appeared as he had surrounded a hundred men and removed them. “Snow,” he said. Man-at-play continues, both in times of war and times of peace.

The farm

From my first arrival to New York from France on December 11, 1946, via the Ile de France, I have had to work. Moving to Peekskill, New York, from war-torn Europe was traumatic in its own way. Peekskill seemed so artificial and unreal; the houses looked like cut-out cardboard fronts with nothing behind them. School was another matter. In those days there was no English as a Second Language; nothing like that. I was dropped into high school in January with not enough English to communicate or understand. I would listen to the radio and try to make out what I heard. Football announcers were speaking so fast it was just a blur. A student named Miriam was put in charge of my learning; she would show up and ask me if I was okay and I would say yes and she would disappear. Not much help. Geometry was the only course that made sense to me. English, like the football games, was a blur. Listening to Shakespeare on an old record player, all I could hear was thunder. Speech was like a rumble. Yet, by June I passed all my courses, with Ds and a B minus in French because I could not translate very well. Once I got laughs in class because I mispronounced “unique.” I said I was the “eunuch” child of the family.

My aunt and uncle set up a farm job for me in the summer in Saratoga Springs. I was looking forward to it, expecting a land of plenty. Instead it was a milk farm, with about twenty cows to milk at dawn. So no Garden of Eden full of vegetables. Food was bought at the supermarket. Days were spent out in the field turning hay into bales, which I would stack up behind the tractor that moved up and the down the field.  

The farmer cursed all day long. I was stunned there were so many curse words. He put me on a tractor — I had never driven anything — the very first day going up and down a field spreading it with stinking manure. It was a John Deere tractor. I thought that was the farmer’s name. We had to get up at five in the morning because the cows were lined up moaning in pain with their udders bloated, needing to get milked. 

A long trench behind the cows was filled with their shit and I would have to shovel it all into a wheelbarrow and then wheel it across a plank into the back of a small truck. Once I flipped it over, shit and all, onto the ground below.  

So it went each day. I thought we were done after one day, but the farmer told me his would go on all summer: collect the hay, spread the manure, milk the cows, feed the cows, and let them out to pasture.

Once we had a tremendous thunderstorm and one of the cows got hit. The farmer and I ran out in the rain to her and he tried to revive her to no avail. Not only the cows were in danger. There was an electrical fence around the cows. Once I was throwing a bucket of water outside and it hit the fence. I got a huge shock and the bucket flew up in the air.

Later, I told the farmer, who I thought was John Deere, that I was Jewish and survived the war. He said, “Don’t worry, it is not your fault.” Yet he seemed to think there was something wrong with me. From that day onward, I got terrible assignments, like digging encrusted manure from the ground in one of the barns.

During my time off, I would join the other local kids and we would go to the All-You-Can-Eat Sundae place, and make the rounds there until all we ate was the toppings. There was a girl in town who was always hanging out with the boys. I would find used prophylactics on the ground near the river banks. I was dying to be with her too, but she totally ignored me. I guess at fourteen I was too young for her. Once I went to her house and asked to speak to her. Her father let me in and I sat in her room while she sat in a rocking chair knitting. I could not believe this. She seemed a different person. I left empty-handed. Later at the local movie theater, I sat behind her by chance. She was with a date. He was doing something to her and then she had an orgasm. Her head dropped backwards and we were face to face while she moaned. I said “Hi.” She was so embarrassed she stood up and ran out of the movie house. It was surreal.

I would fantasize about her coming through my window and we would make love all night. Never happened. My only pleasure then was chewing Black Jack gum by the ton. And, of course, fantasy. 

One morning after milking the cows, the farmer’s family and I were having breakfast and the coffee had a strange flavor. Turns out the farmer’s little girl peed in the coffee pot. Mr. Deere said, “So what, it won’t hurt you.” He was right; I am still here.

Messenger Boy

In the end, it did not work out with my aunt. When I came back to Peekskill, there was still time before school started. My uncle worked nights in a bakery. He would bring warm Kaiser rolls to us in the morning, and before he collapsed on the living room couch, we would all have breakfast. The bathroom was L-shaped and that was where I slept on a folding cot. I had to wait for everyone to be done with their business before I could go to sleep. My whole world there collapsed due to a family incident that freaked out my aunt.  

The next day I was carted out of town and a child psychiatrist suggested I live with a foster family in a less restrictive environment. While waiting for a social worker from a Jewish agency to figure out what to do with me, I moved to New York City and got a room on the Upper West Side near 96th Street. During one of the visits, she gave me a Rorschach test, in which all I could see were images of wolves or vaginas. It was odd. She could not understand the correlation between the war experience and sexual development. One was trauma; the other pure frustration.

I got a job as a messenger boy for twenty five dollars a week. My room cost me nine dollars a week and I had a hotplate I could cook on. Once I heated a can of Vienna sausages, thinking they came from Vienna. I worked near Times Square which in 1948 had a Horn and Hardart restaurant that served coffee for 5 cents a cup. The subway cost a nickel as did The New York Times. My job was to deliver posters, drawn by cigar chomping artists, of current movies playing in the area to the lithographers. I wish I had some of those posters of film noir movies with Bogart and company now. After taxes, I was getting twenty-two dollars a week. Once I told my boss about my war experiences, that I survived and I was struggling. He gave me a raise of two dollars and fifty cents a week.  

Finally, the caseworker called me to say she found some options for me where I would not have to work and could go back to school. The choices were Milwaukee, because she thought I was German and would love it there, or Philadelphia. She gave me money to visit Philadelphia for the day and I spent it at the Franklin Institute. When I returned, I told the caseworker that I loved the city. Next thing I knew, I was living with a poor Polish foster family, not far from Moyamensing Prison in South Philadelphia. 

Soda Jerk

I went to South Philadelphia High School for Boys. The girls went to a school on the other side of a wall, which we used to climb to see them. I got a job after school as a soda jerk at the local pharmacy. I could not do today what I did then, but I knew how to make all kinds of concoctions with ice cream. I was still learning English in those days. Once, a woman at the counter, who I had just served a sundae, asked me if I had dried nuts or wet nuts. At the time, I did not know how to answer her question. Once in the basement going over stock supplies, I saw cases of “sanitary napkins.” I opened a box to take a look and thought it was a neat idea to have all napkins rolled up and ready to use at the table. Later while getting a bottle of Citrate of Magnesium, the bottle fell to the ground and exploded. A shard of glass cut my wrist and blood gushed out of an artery like a fountain. The pharmacist created a tourniquet around my arm until the ambulance came. Everything was okay. Once again, I am still here. 

Another boy lived at the Polish family’s house. The kids at school called him called Tojo, because he had slanted eyes. He liked gambling in the street and took me along. I would lose my seven dollars I made each week at the pharmacy. Sometimes a policeman wandered by and watched us shoot dice in the school yard. One of the boys gave him some money and he walked off. At other times, a creepy guy in a business suit stood by and watched us play. 

The City of Brotherly Love

I asked the Jewish Agency if I could live alone when I reached eighteen. They allowed me to move into my own one-room apartment. I got one of those apartments with a Murphy bed that went into the wall. I was so close to the street that when a tramway came by the whole room shook. Eventually, I moved to a one-room studio off Rittenhouse Square, with a bed on the floor and a very small record player with Vivaldi Extravaganza concertos playing non-stop. People would stop by just to hang out. Philadelphia was a very musical city.  

I went to Temple University. My freshman paper, which was required of all freshmen, was on Existentialism. I subtitled it: “The Age of Despair.” My teacher was a minister and loved the idea, thinking I was going to decimate it. But I didn’t. I ate it up, reading everyone I could: Camus, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and, of course, Sartre. His book, Being and Nothingness, stated we are born like an empty page and become someone later. I got slammed by the teacher. He read passages out loud to the class wanting to show the absurdity of Existentialism. He gave me an F for the course. 

Around this time, I met a young girl, Bina. My first love really, innocent to the end; she suggested I show my paper to her writing teacher, Dr. Lazarus. He read the paper in the student lobby and loved it. In my conclusion, I quoted from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, in which on his deathbed, Myshkin states how, if he had more moments to live, he would enjoy sunsets, nature, and the world around him. I stated that in essence was how one should live every day, as if it was your last. When you die, I wrote, there is no one there to tuck you in. Dr. Lazarus loved that line. I realize now how much that must have meant to him then, since he was old and thinking of death. He told me he wanted me in his class even though it was a senior class. Most of what he did for that class was warn us not to write pulp fiction. And he read out loud from Joyce’s The Dubliners, spending an entire class reading “The Dead,” as the ultimate short story, praising its “inside-outside description” as he called it. Every word Joyce put down had a deeper meaning. I wrote a piece about the ship I was on, the Ile de France, as it entered the New York Harbor on December, 11, 1946, fog and all, and how the skyscrapers emerged as if from a strange world. He thought my writing was too cinematic and knocked it. The class was way above my level, but it imprinted on me how important it was to write meaningfully.

In order to earn some extra spending money above what the agency was doing for me, I got a job working at Campbell’s Soup across the river in Camden. I took the subway after school and worked there from four to midnight. At first, I was lifting buckets of okra into large trays from which women sorted out the bad ones from the good ones. Eventually the okra would end up in the Pepper Pot soup. I noticed men walking around in white suits. I asked them what they were doing and they told me “Food Inspection.” I went to talk to Mr. Bean — his real name — and asked if I could do that. Since I was a college student, he said I could and the next thing I knew I was standing on a platform with the cook and several workers. There were about eight huge receptacles, in which stock would be poured from pipes above and then ingredients would be thrown in from buckets that were brought there by workers. Everything was stirred by the cook and heated. My job was to make sure the ingredients were still fresh and not laying around too long, or that they did not put double the amount in, especially the spices and salt. In the height of summer, all we made was tomato soup. Each receptacle would get a huge ten pound slab of butter.

When the soups got mixed, people below the platform came around with large receptacles and placed them under the soup. The cook would unplug the valve and let the soup pour out into the receptacles below. Once in a while he would miss and the soup would spill out on the floor below. The receptacles were then wheeled to another area where suction tubes sucked up the soup into cans, which were sealed. Who was the insatiable giant we kept feeding around the clock? The cans went into a pressure cooker. The chemist who came around to test the soups told me the heating process made it okay to have three rat hairs and fifty larvae eggs in the soup. They were cooked to death and pressurized. You could not get pure, clean soup no matter how hard you tried. 

I also had summer jobs. One was with Publickers, a whiskey distillery. My job was to supervise the women employees to make sure they were putting labels on correctly. The entire factory was immersed in alcohol vapors, so we all were constantly inebriated and happy. One salvage cage was for broken bottles and the man inside it was floating on clouds. By the end of the day, we were hugging each other and singing songs. 

Later I got transferred to another section of the distillery where the leftover potato peels were transformed into cattle feed. I became the operator of a huge kettle drum, the size of a truck, in which dried-out peel became desiccated. It was a horrendous job. Hot and endless. I worked strange, alternating shifts. Day to evening, night to morning. Horrendous, especially the midnight to eight shift. When I went home, I could not fall asleep until noon. By the time I woke up, I had to return right to work, exhausted and groggy. It was as if I lost a day each time. And then when you got used to one shift, you switched to another shift.

It was around this time that I almost became a full-fledged, card-carrying Communist. There was a man at the distillery, who used to come with books under his arms by Engels, Marx, and Trotsky. The distillery was the perfect setting that Marx talked of leading to a revolution. Eventually I got caught up in a wildcat strike, where we were ordered to walk out on the job, with the machines still running. Workers came around carrying wrenches and ordering us to leave everything running and walk out on the job. I did not belong to the union so it meant I was out of work.  

I got another job with Domino Sugar as a centrifugal operator. I had to stand on top of a machine that spun around, separating sugar from the dark parts, in effect, refining it. It was so hot that we each had a salt tablet dispenser behind us for when we felt faint from the heat.  

The last factory job I had was working as a high arc welder trainee. I was trained for a week, practicing on pieces of metal, cutting them instead of welding them. I got so badly burned that my entire chest was bright red. The doctor told me I was literally getting burned as I welded. My heavy plaid shirt was not enough to protect me. I had to wear a dark mask and saw nothing but a spark for four hours straight before getting a break. Eventually, I would have chased car chassis on a line, welding any hole that I would see. I quit that job fast. 

Philadelphia had many great cultural attractions: the Museum of Art, at which Rocky Balboa runs up the steps in the movie. There is a statue of Rocky in front of the Museum now. The city’s Rodin Museum, which is replica of the one in Paris, immortalizes sculptures of a higher nature. 

It was at this time that I ordered my first camera through the mail. It was a very small one, like a Minox, but cost $9.95. I took photos of Bina, my first love, right by the Musee Rodin. We used to make out there in the dark, among the statues in the garden. The Thinker, the Disciples, the Door of Hell. Feeling Rodin’s spirit as my hands traveled all over Bina’s body as if she were one of his sculptures 

But it was not Bina I ended up with. In fact, she left me for another man. Once I stood under her window, five floors up, and cried out that I loved her. She leaned over and told me to go away, and then spit on me. So much for first love. 

It was another woman that I married. One that I met at the Bucket O’ Blood, a bar on Rittenhouse Square. She was sitting at the next booth with another woman. I leaned over and said hello and asked them if they were musicians. Everyone in that area seemed to be one. She is a pianist, her companion said. I asked if she would teach me piano. Yes she would and we made a date. On my first date she said we could work on Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena comprised of easy pieces. Up to that point, I had been hanging out with what was then called Bohemians. The women I met were very attractive, but so neurotic I could not get anywhere with them. One was stuck on this really handsome homosexual. He may even have been an actual toreador. Another woman came over to my one-room studio and ended up in bed with a bisexual, who finally gave in to her. But I never connected. So it was a total change to meet someone who was willing and able to go to bed with me. On our first date at her house, she cooked a huge porterhouse steak for dinner. Before you knew it, we were on the living room floor making out. At the momentous moment, rather than resisting as all of the other women I met up to that point had, she gave in. When I told her I needed protection, she said she used the rhythm method. Next thing I knew she was pregnant. I did consider finding a doctor in Pennsylvania who did abortions, which were not legal at this point, but that was very expensive then and almost impossible to carry through. I dropped out of Temple University, which was great for me while it lasted, and moved to New York City.

I Love New York

We moved to a small room on Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue. I got a job working for Wolf Bindery for 90 cents an hour. That job consisted of standing by a huge machine, which bound books en masse. It would kill me when some book, such as classics like the complete works of Shakespeare, had to be thrown away because the binding went wrong. The machine would go out of whack and destroy dozens of books. 

I was still doing photography and bought my first used Rolleiflex. A friend led me to apply as a surveillant at the Lycée Français de New York. I was in charge of discipline. Me, in charge of discipline. The school was a world unto itself. So old-fashioned even then, as if stepping into old France. You could not bring in a ballpoint pen; it had to be a fountain pen so you could write in cursive. Of course, you had to speak French. When a student misbehaved, he would get a zero for conduct. Three zeros led to expulsion. The classes I led often became so chaotic it reminded me of the movie Zéro de Conduite directed by Jean Vigo, in which the students take over the school. In that movie the principal was a dwarf. That is about how it felt at the Lycée Français. The supervisor would walk in — a woman who spread fear and trembling in all the students — and it became instantly quiet. Once I wanted to reach the students more so I played my harmonica during study hall. I got called into the Supervisor of Discipline’s office, Monsieur Kieffer, who told me “la police, Charles, if faut faire la police.” You have to be the police. Me? Police?

When school ended I got into more trouble, because I had drawn a heart into a student’s school yearbook, wishing her well. I was not asked to come back the next year. 

It was then that I was led to the idea of being an assistant photographer by a friend who had been doing it for years. After all, I had studied with Harold Feinstein, met Robert Frank and W. Eugene Smith, and took photographs left and right in the street. I was recommended to an agent at the Berhman Agency in a real dingy little office near Times Square. I showed him my photos and indicated that I knew how to print. That was all I needed. The agent was amazing. He had a Rolodex filled with all the major photographers in the city from Avedon on down. How would I like to assist a fashion photographer in the Upper East Side who did work for magazines? I accepted with some trepidation. I had taken photos of my three children and the Cloisters. (Yes, three children by then, born one after the other, rhythm method, nursing period when one could not get pregnant, and finally a diaphragm that could stay in for a week.) I knew even then that you had to shoot rolls and rolls of the same thing to get the right shot. Even in the street, Harold Feinstein used to encourage me not to use the rangefinder. We should not try to compose. 

My first interview was with Allan Arbus who had a studio in a mansion around 77th Street in Manhattan. A big move from my thirty-five dollars a month, and living in a 10th Street and Avenue B apartment. We hit it right off and my accent came in handy to add flair to the job. He loved the contact sheets of my kids at the Cloisters and hired me. I ended up dusting off a Deardorff eight-by-ten large format camera and setting up shots. Models flowed in and out and I flowed among them, surrounded by a strange, beautiful world I could only imagine before.  

Diane Arbus would come in to use the darkroom (Allan and Diane were separated by then) and their daughter, Doon, wandered in and out too. Once I did not let Diane in the darkroom because I had work to do. She was studying with Lisette Model and the school of the grotesque. Even back then Allan was studying mime and he loved Marcel Marceau. I was a follower of Jean-Louis Barrault, who starred in the film Children of Paradise about a mime. Eventually Allan Arbus had a role in the TV series “M*A*S*H”. He died just last year at the age of ninety three. I lasted about a year with Arbus and went on to assist others: Peter Basch, Robert Monroe. 

I started to go to lectures given by a medium, Eva Pierrakos, and eventually attended a sort of new age group called The Pathwork. I had sessions with Eva, who was very perceptive and a good analyst. I became a helper myself, giving sessions to others. This grew into a practice where I helped about thirty people each week and made good money doing so. I could not call myself a therapist but a helper. I also conducted large groups of singles and couple groups and then family groups. I would always have a team to work with. I was good at it. The group grew overseas and I conducted week-long, marathon sessions in Holland. 

This is when I met my second wife, Adrienne, who used to live with David Bienstock, who was then film curator at the Whitney Museum’s experimental film department. He was avant-garde and showed films of Stan Brakhage who is now well-known. But he was heavily criticized once in the New York Times. Bienstock committed suicide. I was of a team that comforted Adrienne, and eventually a year later, got involved with her and got married. We had a son, Adam, who was born in 1980.

I was supervised by Dr. John P. and we had weekly case presentations. If a session was over my head, I called others who were more qualified than I, or a psychiatrist. Then Eva died. And that was the end of that for me.

Maine: The Way Life Should Be

I moved to Maine with my wife and Adam, who was just two years old. He was born in New York Hospital in May of 1980, the same time the Shah of Iran was there for an operation. I had to go through a curtain of policemen to get to my son. Moving to Maine in 1982 was yet another turning point. I have always missed New York City and all its innuendos. It was a shock at first moving here from Gotham. Damariscotta had one main street with a couple of lights. All the stores were closed by nine at night. The town changed into an Edward Hopper scene. 

By then my wife became a registered nurse and easily got a job in a nursing home. I got a job working in a group home for teens whom had gotten into trouble with the law and were given a chance to function in an open situation. I would sleep over for a weekend then get a week off. Again a strange schedule. There were usually two of us working and the other person was more experienced. At night I could barely sleep. I felt the kids were up to no good. Some were there from juvenile court for breaking and entering offenses. If I asked them what they did wrong, they would say they made a mistake.  

That job started the undoing of my marriage. The week-long separation was odd. Not sure if I could trust my wife during that week, I got tense and tenser. At this time, we moved into a caretaker’s house on a property adjoining open wilderness. A huge change from New York City. But we adjusted. We used a woodstove and we had a huge room upstairs, an entire floor surrounded by windows. Once it filled with bees who had occupied the chimney. They all eventually died flying in a circle. I left my job and started working at the same nursing home as my wife. By then she had moved on to in-home nursing. For one day, I was trained as an activity coordinator. One day! Then I worked with another woman in a large room and created activities. If someone died, the funeral parlor sent over all the flowers and we did flower arrangements in small pots to put in all the rooms. The patients would always ask who died now?

I lasted nine months in this job and moved on to working in a state mental institution, as a mental health worker. A crazy job really. If someone had keys you knew they worked there. It was the only way one could tell a madman from a worker. Augusta Mental Health Institute. I was trained for one week, because I would have to take blood pressures and provide basic nursing care.  

I was even involved in giving someone a cosmic enema. We practiced on an old man who had been constipated for days. We put a rubber sheet on the bed and then dispensed liquid from a higher post, and, of course, the results were apocalyptic, with water everywhere. I did not have to do more of those.  

When it came to psychiatric training, the first day a group of us were told to wait in the other room and when we came back they had this dummy hanging from a pipe above. I was frozen not knowing what to do. But one of us climbed on a chair and cut him down. I should have quit right then and there. Eventually I worked on a small special unit that always had the most agitated patients at the time. One girl called me Merv Griffin and wanted to know why she could not be on my show. Eventually she accused me of stealing her throat. One young woman who was on suicide watch and had no clothes managed to commit suicide by stuffing a blanket down her throat. I lasted nine months on that job. 

I went on to becoming a child protection caseworker. I worked in Lewiston and my job was to go to homes which had been reported as having some sort of child abuse. I had to be careful not to enter without permission. Sometimes I would show up and a kid only five years old would open the door. And that was the point, he was home alone unsupervised with his brother who was eleven. The brothers told me that the neighbor downstairs would check on them now and then while their mother was at work in a bar. I asked the neighbor if there was a fire upstairs would they be responsible? Of course not. Cases like that had to be addressed. There was one case, before I worked there, where the mother put her son in an oven and killed him because a voice told her to do so.  

The worst case I dealt with, the one that burned me out, involved this seven-year-old girl who one day told her teacher that her twenty-one year old brother had sexually abused her for a year and that was why she walked funny, not because she had polio as she had told her teacher before. I got to the school and waited for the mother to show up. She did, in the presence of a detective, and she denied that anything like that could have happened. We took custody of the child and her brother was arrested. But because he was mentally challenged, he ended up in a psychiatric ward. Eventually the mother lost her parental rights for putting her child in constant jeopardy. Such cases caused my anxiety level to go way up. I lasted nine months in that job. 

I did not work for a year until one day I substituted in a school. I liked the hours and the calmness of the job. I found out I qualified to be a full-time foreign language teacher with good pay, 178 workdays, and tons of vacation. That was my last job. I retired when I reached sixty-two and collected social security. I moved into subsidized housing, which in Maine is much more humane than in New York City. I pay almost the same rent as I paid when I lived on the Square on the East Side in the Sixties. I go to schools as a sub when I feel like working. 

Now I juggle many things: photography, painting, writing, and, oh yes, talking to students about my war experience as a hidden child in World War II. But, that is another story. 

Charles Rotmil, Robert Indiana

In contradiction to shooting nakedly and honestly as a street photographer, I was also an assistant commercial photographer, working on the edges of dishonesty. W. Eugene Smith, the uncompromising photojournalist, who was once my neighbor on 6th Avenue in the Flower District, told me he would never work on a cigarette advertisement. Most of the time I hated to assist in shoots such as fake soup ads and cigarette campaigns. Working five years on the dark side, I did mostly food photography with Irwin Horowitz. Once, for Campbell’s Soup, an account executive wanted us to show that the soup had lots of ingredients, which it did not. So we put in clear marbles to raise the level of the soup and make the ingredients rise to the top. A lawyer came by the set and said we could not do this anymore, so we had someone make us shallow soup dishes. And so it went. 

One time we did a food story for Women’s Day about a chocolate cake that Ann Landers had created. The Dear Abby variety. We used foam boards cut into a circle and then covered them with shaving cream. No one could tell if it was real or not. Another time we had Phyllis Diller in the studio for a recipe she called Garbage Soup: “All the garbage in the fridge that you could throw together. Like stone soup, the one where you start with a stone and water and then add all kinds of stuff to it…” She was a card. Always funny. 

We had one shot when the art director wanted Phyllis to be hanging backwards with her arms outstretched. I was asked to hold her down behind the set. So I held my arms around both her legs and part of her hips, while she hung over backwards and did her thing, flinging her arms around. To this day, I remember it as not the most pleasant of embraces.  

Bill Monroe

With Bill Monroe, the photographer, I was interviewed for a job and he told me to show up at 4AM for a shoot. I did not understand why so early, but I showed up. His other assistant was outside the studio in a red Triumph. “Where is your stuff?” the assistant asked me. “What do you mean?” “Your stuff, man; we are going sailing for four days!” We drove back to my pad on East 10th Street and Avenue B to get some underwear and other necessities. 

We drove out to Long Island to meet the sailboat. We would shoot the whole product campaign for Coca Cola in four days and do as many ads as possible. Because this was for European publication, the models had a worldly look. I loved it, but I busted my ass loading Kodachrome 25 and taking light measurements. With such film you could not manipulate the process with the film, so it had to be accurate, or bracket some shots. The situations were complex: typical sailing shots of young couples looking as happy as possible, leaning over the edge of the boat and drinking Coke. In between shots, the art director rolled joints for all of us. I could not partake, because I would not have been able to tell an F stop from a stop sign. I had to keep my head clear. We set beach parties with the sun setting in the background, and, of course, the party would go on. I had to stay in a motel on the shore while the director and the rest of the crew stayed on the boat with some of the models.

Peter Basch

I also worked for Peter Basch, who was a glamour photographer, shooting people like Brigitte Bardot and other movie stars. I once opened the door to Kevin McCarthy, who was in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We did not say anything except smile at each other. One day Kim Novak came to the door, all by herself. A stunning woman I thought, and she sort of liked me as well, or maybe that was the effect she had on everyone: Just smile and let you take her in. She went into the studio, and I loaded up some sheet film for a four-by-five view camera. I had trouble loading up film at times; I would miss the groove in the darkroom. If you pulled the slide out and the film was not loaded properly, the film would fall out. Peter came to get the loaded film from me and went back into the shooting studio. I was kept out of that one. Well, the intercom came on with Peter shouting for me to come to the set. When I got in, Novak was lying on a couch in a negligee. Peter was furious at me because some of the film came apart as he tried to load up the camera. “Is this the way to load film?” I was totally humiliated. When I looked over at Novak, she looked at me smiling in a way that said not to worry about it. My prospect of marrying her and having a good life together was blown away right then and there.

Catering to the Famous and Infamous

One time I went to the employment office for New York City and got a job working for a tailor shop as a salesman. I found myself at Sills of Cambridge on the second floor of 49th Street and Fifth Avenue. The shop was run and owned by two brothers, who had a similar store in Cambridge near Harvard University. Their last name was actually Silverstein or something like that but they it shorten it to Sills. Not as Jewish, I guess. The younger brother, Ben, interviewed and hired me on the spot. They liked my look, sort of European with longish hair and a natural turtle neck sweater made in Ireland. In fact, I had bought this sweater from an ad that required exact measurements and the company would knit it custom. Well, I got the sweater back and it fit exactly. It was so tight I could barely breathe. You were supposed to give slightly larger measurements but I did not know this. In any case the Sills / Silversteins liked my looks. 

No one came into the shop off the street. One could walk by and not even know the shop was there. I was not to question anyone who came in, just give them whatever they wanted and have them sign for it. It was really simple. There were yards of fabric and drawers full of fine shirts. There were two kinds of suits. Those that were ready made, but could be altered and even mixed. And the suits made to order after one picked the fabric, basted and so on, until they fit exactly. Those cost much more. 

Leonard Bernstein came in once and asked for a shirt. I opened some drawers, and he picked a white shirt and signed for it. The coolest thing was to act normal and not seem surprised at seeing him. The tailor came out from the back with a jacket he had for him, basted, i.e., with loose threads that could still be pulled out. Bernstein wanted to make sure that when he raised his arms up high, the sleeve did not ride all the way down his arm while he was conducting.  

Later I discovered he was going to rehearse in an outdoor stadium way up in the Bronx at City College. I went up there and found the orchestra ready to rehearse. I asked Bernstein if it was okay for me to sit with the musicians, so I could take photographs. You could see the cityscape behind him, even some laundry hanging to dry in the distance. It was a cool shot and I sent it to the Times, but they were not interested. I always had the chutzpah to do things like this; all they could say was no. I wish I had known Bernstein better, but often when meeting someone famous like him, there is nothing to say to them. I respected their privacy.

Another time Anthony Perkins walked in asking for a shirt. He was in a play on Broadway at the time, I think, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, or maybe it was Tea and Sympathy. He was tall and slender. In those days, I had no idea he was gay or that Bernstein was gay. Who knew? It was all hush-hush back then. I acted professionally and did not say much more than ask what he needed help with. I opened a drawer filled with shirts; we had several, and he chose one. I had him sign for it and that was it. 

Way back I was already familiar with homosexuality from reading Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Jean Marais… did I leave anyone out? The idea was accepted in France way before here. In the current world, Ginsberg who was my neighbor on 10th street, was all too familiar. Never felt uncomfortable. But I felt closer to Jack Kerouac’s lifestyle than anyone else.

Every Thursday we had a reception after five. The Sills brothers gave me money and told me to buy several bottles of hard liquor. We had a cart on wheels and the next thing you know I am the bartender. I never mixed drinks before. Just like in Mad Men everyone drank in those days, and I mean drank all day without seeming to get drunk. As one person told me, it took the edge off. Even the Sills drank all day and then sang songs from musicals. As much as I tried, I did not like to drink, except for wine and some liqueur. I also got to like gin and tonics, so I knew how to mix that. I would stand there behind the cart and mix drinks. The front of the store filled with people. 

At the open house, a man told me he was a king. Another man told me he was a pilot. I thought he meant or the big airlines. I asked him which airline he flew for and he answered his own. “I fly people to safaris in Africa on my own plane.” Once I delivered several pairs of pants to the house of Adolph Green and Betty Comden, the writers of several famous musicals. For a while, I was immersed in this other world. 

Maxwell Bodenheim

I met Maxwell Bodenheim in the Village. He was a wild one, writing poetry for a buck so he could get a drink. Most people did not know who he was. He had written a batch of pulp fiction mystery novels, like Naked on Roller Skates. For about a week he latched on to me whenever he saw me. There used to be a cafeteria on 6th Avenue and 8th Street. I bought him breakfast there once, and he covered his eggs with ground black pepper. I mean covered. His woman friend scolded him. “If I want to put pepper on my eggs, I can do whatever I want with them,” he drunkenly shouted. I guess his taste buds were gone by then from all the drinking.  

Once he came by my apartment, just a room really, on 10th Street near Sixth Avenue. I left him there while I went out to get some more food. When I came back, he was gone. He drank all of the cooking wine I had in the cupboard. I do not even know if it was real wine. Still he drank all of it. Just a month later, I read in the papers that a drifter had allowed Bodenheim to stay in his room somewhere in the Village and tried to seduce Bodenheim’s woman. According to the papers, the drifter raped her and then killed them both. Even Bodenheim’s editors could not help him; they sent him some money to no avail. He was a lost soul by then. 

Jacques Lipchitz

I got involved with Horace Richter when I met the painter Bob Thompson at the Cedar Bar. That led to taking photos for Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor. I would take the train to the Upper Hudson River Valley to Lipchitz’s studio to photograph his vast African collection. He felt inspired by such work. I took a few photos of him as well. Once the door rang and when I opened it, a small man was standing there. It was Billie Rose the impresario. He asked to come in. Rose at that time had arranged to have all of Lipchitz’s original clay sculptures shipped to Israel for a new museum dedicated to Lipchitz. Lipchitz was always very tired and wanted to nap and that is when I took a photo of him sort of floating in space, from the top of a ladder. We did not say much during that month I photographed his African collection.

Andy Warhol

I knew from the crowd at the Cedar Bar, a gang of artist, writers and photographers, about openings on Tuesdays. At the opening for Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup show, Andy had cans of soup, real cans of tomato soup, there, and he would sign them for $100. It was wild. Suddenly, Salvador Dali was standing next to Warhol, and I said, “Bonjour, Monsieur Dali.” He just stared at me, eyes wide open and whirled his thin, long mustache, which seemed to levitate above his upper lip. He cupped his lips, but did not say a word. He smirked at me, again with eyes wide open. I mean what was there to say? He was definitely a genius but also chose to be a jester. He is the one who said once, “Il faut épater le bourgeois?” You must tickle the rich man’s fancy.  

I used to run into Warhol at a small restaurant on 6th Street and Avenue A. Macrobiotics was still a new thing, and we both ate the same dish: a bowl of brown rice topped with black beans and with some salt mixed with sesame seed. The cost: one dollar. It did the trick as far as we were concerned.

Red Grooms

I met Red once at an all-night party and got him confused with another artist, Steve Durkee. They were both sort of thin and tall and had red hair. I knew Steve from the artist community in Haverstraw, which was an outshoot from Black Mountain College. The community, called the Land, had its own school. It was typical of that area of New York, which started anarchist and, eventually, independent schools. I liked Red a lot and once we ran down 6th Avenue near midnight, knocking down garbage cans as if we were in a giant football field. This was about the time he took his paint-splattered shirt and stretched it upon a canvas. Even the 10th Street Gallery refused to show it.

One time I took Red with me to visit Chaim Gross and his daughter, Mimi, or maybe he took me. I knew Mimi from parties. In fact, I mistook someone else for her at a party. I fell asleep in a bed on the floor of a big loft. A woman stood over me and said, “You are in my bed.” I said, “Well, if it is your bed, come on in.” She did and in no time at all we were at it. I got lost in her huge breasts. But it was not Mimi. Years later, when I was married to A, I met her brother, who was a tattoo artist in Woodstock. His wife said to me, “You don’t remember me do you?” And I said, “Should I?” and she reminded me that she was the woman at the party, and I had forgotten all about it. 

I was drawn to Mimi. At the time, Chaim Gross taught a sculpture course at the New School or NYU in NYC. Wood sculpture, which is a totally other matter. You cannot make mistakes with wood. I never tried. I like clay or other mediums, like pastel, water color, gouache, and oil. Gouache is my favorite. Immediate and fast, not so many layers needed. And you can correct and change things, even weeks or months later.  

When we got to Chaim’s house, as we climbed the stairs to his living space, I passed a photograph of Chaim with Chagall. I was really immersed in that world at the time. The upshot of that meeting was that Red got involved with Mimi and eventually married her. The next thing I knew they were travelling all over Italy in a horse-drawn caravan, doing puppet plays out of the back. That may have even been one of my ideas. I once gave a friend of mine an idea like that, and he and his wife took me up on it. They got a small carousel on the back of a truck and sold ice cream and made a lot of money for a couple of years. Years later, they thanked me for the idea.

Red got really big when he created models of cities out of papier mache with the help of some assistants and Mimi. Great works of cities, like Chicago and New York. Red once exhibited in a large hall in Grand Central Station. He had a show recently where he was selling some of these things, like a life-size city bus, which one could climb aboard with people sitting in the seats. The fact that he is letting go of these now says something about him. I know how that feels: to let go of something special. I have been obsessed with a recent photograph I took of a gypsy accordion player in Paris. I did a water color, then a gouache, then a pastel, then an oil. I will not sell them at this point, unless someone offered a ridiculous price for them. To me, they are worth millions. 

Steve Durkee

Steve Durkee is a weird bird. I met him through the same art opening scene, at a party John Chamberlain had. It lasted all night; some of us even fell asleep on Sunday morning on the fire escape. We could see people going to church. What did they think of us?

Steve and I bonded in a homoerotic way, as Freud would have said. We talked endlessly about the meaning of life, the universe, and some of the time’s spiritual leaders, like Meher Baba. Baba, an Indian word for father, had taken a vow of silence and preached that love was the answer to everything. His followers understood what he meant with sign language and in other non-verbal ways. Personally, I could not go one day without talking. Try it. Talking is like breathing to me. Steve had pictures of Meher Baba in his studio on Fulton Street.

This is where Steve brought me to meet Robert Indiana, who had already made a reputation with his one-word sculptures created from found wood and metal wheel, which he rescued from downtown streets and dumps. Bob lives on Vinalhaven Island now. I saw him recently and took a photo of him lying on a couch in the manner of Truman Capote. Back then, Bob also had a studio in the Fulton Street area. His lovers were busy at a sewing machine. Bob pulled out some of his one word paintings, like EAT, a sort of phallic post from railroad beddings, for me to see. He was on to something and it works for him to this day. His works incorporating “LOVE” are everywhere, even on a stamp. 

Steve changed after he helped design the Sufi retreat in Lama, New Mexico, near Taos: The Lama Foundation. Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Marshall McLuhan were all influential, and just to show you how close we were, I went to visit him there in the 1980s, and we slept near the top of Sangre de Cristo Mountain where the Lama Foundation was to be built. From up there, the landscape looked like the beginning of creation. I wrote a piece which was published in The Saturday Review entitled “The Apocalypse is a Nice Place to Visit, But… .” In it, I parodied the dropping out scenes of the time, people moving away and creating communes that actually replicated the stuff from the cities with all the city innuendoes and acting out between couples. What they were dropping out of was control. They could do whatever they wanted by replacing city life with new restrictions guided by new spiritual rules. The New Age had begun, started in Esalen, a retreat in California near Big Sur.  

Esalen was not there when I went to see Henry Miller. Then it was the Nepenthe Inn, and there were natural springs in which one could bathe, while facing the endless Pacific Ocean, sometimes over the clouds. Again, the beginning of creation, where the acting out continued with everyone getting it on with each other, including the guru who would get the most. 

Eva Broch / Pierrakos 

In 1973, I was led by friends to a medium named Eva Broch, who was related to the writer Herman Broch, who formed a German triumvirate with Hesse and Mann. She was drawn to Eastern Philosophy by the Banes collection of books, including the I Ching, used by Carl Jung. The Book of Changes and Jung books were everywhere. Chance encounters and events were meant to happen; synchronicity Jung called it. John Cage was a big proponent of chance in composing his music. According to Jung, there was order in chaos (actually a Chinese proverb) and a collective consciousness that was shared by all. This would drive Freud crazy as his former followers, like Jung and Reich went off on their own and devised their own eccentric theories. Jung with his mandalas and Reich with his focus on genitalia. Reich’s book, The Function of the Orgasm, is still on sale at the souvenir shop in Rangeley, Maine where Reich had a retreat to perform his experiments with orgone boxes made of steel wool and tin. The box definitely got real hot, but Reich maintained the box was a collector of orgone energy. He sent one of the boxes to Einstein, who wrote back and said there was a simpler explanation for the heat. 

The interested can see all Reich’s stuff at Rangeley along with his cloud busters, a long tube filled with steel wool which he would aim at clouds. When the clouds split, Reich would claim responsibility. John Pierrakos, a former patient of Reich’s who I knew well, replicated these experiments near Woodstock. He would also put old razor blades under little metal pyramids and claimed they would sharpen in a few days because of the collective energy caught in the scattered pyramids. John aimed one of those cloud busters into the sky claiming he could cause rain on command.  

I had sessions with Eva Pierrakos. In exchange for a fee, I would cook for her sometimes. Those sessions benefited me greatly, in spite of all the hullabaloo with guided spirits and mediums. What counted most was her keen perception and inventive dream interpretation, which brought up real buried feelings, some painful some pleasurable. 

Once they invited Alexander Lowen to dinner, who wrote The Betrayal of the Body. I made truite bleu, a lightly cooked, almost raw trout, turned blue. The Betrayal of the Body is a marvelous book on character analysis. Contrary to Freud, he broke up the body into the masochist structure, which was even top and bottom; the psychopathic structure, which was heavier on top, as if the body was the body was floating off the ground; and the split structure, where the top was heaviest and the bottom light, as if you were easy to topple. While Freud put the patient on the couch, Reich made him stand up, and Lowen made him stand up and move. This all led to movement classes tied to emotional outbursts of anger and sadness, which were buried or hidden behind body armors. The idea of anger management sessions is credited to Reich. 

Bob Fass

I was an avid follower of WBAI; I listened to the station all the time. It was there that I heard the first recordings of Bob Dylan as they came out. Bob Fass had a show called “Radio Unnamable” that started at midnight and went on to dawn. On my own, I recorded material for him. I had an Uher tape recorder, reel to reel, that recorded at a high level, not as good as a Niagra, but it was fine, and I owned it. Once I recorded sounds of the city: a Puerto Rican church service, the footsteps and noises of the subway, steps walking in the street, and the bells from Salvation Army Santas standing on street corners. I would come into the studio and give the tape to Bob, and without even listening to it, he would put it on and let it play for half an hour. He was amazing that way, profound and like nothing else on the radio back then. 

There was also a guy in Philadelphia who did amazing stuff on the radio, talking on and on and captivated everyone. Jean Sheperd. He had a way of going off on tangents. Once he talked about memos: How office officials sent memos to one another and he imagined one of them publishing his memos as a book. Sort of a prediction of Tweets.  

I heard him in person once when he was broadcasting from a restaurant inside a hotel in Philadelphia. He went on and on in spite of the din in the restaurant. He mesmerized his listeners. Once he asked his listeners to lean out their windows and shout something all over the city. I cannot remember what it was, but he had a hold on people. He was way ahead of his time. Bob Fass on the other hand was more underground, being on late into the night, past midnight to 3AM or later. Yet he managed to play new Dylan music first and play the whole record. In vinyl. 

Kurt Seligmann

When I lived on 10th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, I hung out a lot at the New School for Social Research, which is still going strong with great writing courses. I heard Robert Frost read there. One day I was in the elevator with a man who held a small painting in his hands. It looked like one of Monet’s studies of Rouen Cathedral at noon. Is that a copy? I asked. “No it’s the real thing. I bought it from him. I am giving a class here you want to come? We are going to look at it.” The man was the surrealist Kurt Seligmann.

And that we did. We sat around the painting in a darkened room with only the painting lit. Monet wanted those same shadows at noon, so he came back each day and redid the paintings. I became a friend of Seligmann. I went to his studio, which was located right by Bryant Park near the New York Public Library. Each floor had huge windows and this is where Seligmann painted. He was immersed in alchemy and used egg tempura to simulate the special glow produced by medieval painting techniques. His figures were draped and wrapped up, including the heads. They conveyed an eerie feeling.  

Once I brought Jill Johnson there, who wrote pieces for The Village Voice on dance and art. She had a diary style of writing, all up front. We met at a party given by John Chamberlain after an opening for his car part sculptures. I liked her right off and told her she had the legs of a peasant, and I liked that. We hit it off and ended up in my pad on 10th Street. We were only involved for about two weeks. I was really not mature enough for her. She had two children and would call me in desperation. I could not handle it and I broke it off. She never forgave me for that. It was sad, really. Years later, I met her in Soho in a coffee shop. She was sitting with another woman who may have been her lover; Jill became a lesbian by that time. She did not even look up when I went over to say hello.

But she loved visiting Seligmann, and we all talked about the old days, the ones he knew about with the Ernsts and Tanguy. Once when I was there, Seligman got a phone call to say Tanguy had just died. He was in shock. Later suffering from illness, Seligmann went out to hunt crows at his country house and they found him dead in the field from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A suicide, like Van Gogh. 

Interviews with Photographers

Years later in the seventies, I went on a job interview to assist Irving Penn, who was in the same building as Seligmann once was. I did not meet Penn. The secretary told me there was a list of people who wanted to assist him. No pay. That was impossible as I needed money. Penn had stacks of photographs in wooden portfolios, which the secretary brought out one after the other.

I also interviewed with Arnold Newman. He told me I would not go with him on trips. I would just sit in the studio and probably perform darkroom work in his absence. Behind him, I saw the photo he did of Igor Stravinsky sitting at a grand piano. 

Finally I ended up working for Irwin Horowitz doing still life and food photography for the likes of Campbell Soup, Stouffers, and various ice cream companies. That was the calmest job I ever had. Chefs would come in for shots and we would hang out talking all day about how to boil an egg and so on. I learned a lot in those five years about cooking. Our biggest assignment was for Esquire. We recreated a dinner Alexandre Dumas, the French writer, once ate, which The Four Seasons would recreate as a special event. We set up a display of a row of partridges, then a row of quails, then a row of partridges and more quails and behind a spread of peacock feathers. It was huge and we had to imagine the servants carrying this into the dining room. On the side was a giant bottle of wine, Balthazar. It held roughly 15 liters of wine. 

Mimi Returns

Writing this in October in New York City and going over the places and people I have encountered, the energy of the city is still that of a beehive. It was a holiday weekend and it gets jammed in Midtown. I went to see a Bernard Shaw play, Candida, way over on the West Side on 36th Street in a tiny third-floor theater with an excellent cast. Getting home from there was a hassle, walking down dark streets along 9th Avenue and then taking a crosstown bus to Fifth Avenue and then onward down to 11th Street where I was dog sitting for three weeks. 

Just the other day, I went to an 80th birthday celebration for Philip Roth at the Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue. The opportunity to see Roth filled the place up, and people read from his work. Alec Baldwin read from The Plot against America. But Roth could not make it. He was in the hospital with a bug, they told us. I wonder if the bug’s name was Gregor Samsa.  

It just so happened that as part of an apartment open house, I went back after all these years to Chaim Gross’ apartment in the Village. Marvelous the way it looks now with all his stuff relocated from the Upper West Side: the hanging photographs of Chagall and Gross, and Soyer, as well as Gross’ wooden sculptures, his inspirational African sculpture collection, a painting by DeKooning and more.  

Mimi Gross, his daughter, showed up. Here we were meeting again after fifty years. She is a great painter in her own right. It was marvelous. She was no longer married to Red Grooms. I kissed her and it all came back. Who said you cannot go home again. She still has a youthful, playful feel about her.

*

There is something special about being a street photographer in that one does not need permission to take photographs. No need for model releases. You can shoot away as you please with no reprimand. People may come up to you and object. I can respect that and I will stop, but there is no need for permission in public places. I find that some people want to be photographed, even though they may be a bit shy about it. Yet if I used such a photo in an ad, I would get in trouble. Then you need a model release.

Journalists do this all the time. Recently, The Economist had a cover photo of Assad from Syria. Surely, they did not go over there and ask his permission to use it. This is what Nixon meant when he said they could not kick him around anymore. You could still photograph him but you could not say things about him in public.

That is not my intent in these recollections of illustrious people and places. It is merely another form of my street photography, like Robert Frank’s The Americans, which was shot on the sly and now considered a classic. My writing here, like the best photography, is, most importantly, honest.

Photographs by Charles Rotmil

Charles Rotmil
Jacques Lipchitz

Charles Rotmil
Apartment on 1st Ave and 2nd St, New York
1962

Charles Rotmil
Bob Fass

Charles Rotmil
Bob Thomson

Charles Rotmil
Robert Indiana

Charles Rotmil
Steve Durkee

Charles Rotmil as a “beatnik” in GQ, September 1960 (Photograph by Emma Gene Hall)

When I left Los Angeles in the early morning of November 1959, I had nearly four hundred dollars on me, having recently received all of my unemployment checks of thirty-five dollars a week in a single blow. It seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. I decided to hitch a ride all the way to Guadalajara. Do or die. I guess I did not care what happened to me. Do or die, indeed. My marriage breaking up was really hard and when I took off from New York on a whim, with almost no money at all, I just did not care what happened to me next.

The Los Angeles experience, the angelic experience, gave me a lift, I guess, from the morose state I had fallen into from the marriage breakup. Now I was on the road again, seeing myself in a way as Jack Kerouac, taking his book literally. But instead of marijuana I took five Almond Joy bars, thinking that would be all the food I would need until I got to my destination. I had read an article in the New York Times about a small community in Mexico that made guitars cheap and to get there one had to use a mule. I would figure everything out as soon as I got close to that place. 

I got a ride with a truck driver to outside of Phoenix, Arizona. In the middle of nowhere, I got out and walked to a field that had a huge stack of hay bales. I thought I could sleep on top of that. I walked to the farmhouse and knocked on the door. The farmer’s daughter answered the door and I asked for some water. She seemed curious about me and I thought, “hey, this is how it works, no?” The farmer’s daughter syndrome. But she was quickly pushed aside and the farmer came to the door to ask what I wanted. I asked for a glass of water and if I could sleep on the hay bales. “You want to do what?” He could not figure me out, wearing a t shirt, Levis, and a small backpack. It had gotten dark. They did not let me in the house. I guess I expected more hospitality than that. Instead, they looked at me with suspicion. I asked for a glass of water. I got it, but nothing else. I was hoping for maybe a bowl of hot soup, but never got it. I asked again if I could sleep on the bales of hay. “Sure, if you want to do this,” he said. I was lucky they did not call the police.

I walked over to the huge stack, climbed on top of it, and lay down on the largest bed in the world, sleeping under the stars. Unfortunately, it was not the same as sleeping on plain hay. It was rough almost like sleeping on a bed of nails. The hay bales were tied with metal. But I was so exhausted by then that I fell asleep.

As soon as daylight broke I woke up and I could see the landscape, flat and empty. It was like the beginning of creation or a Salvador Dali painting. On the right, far away, I saw a car approaching. I walked down to the road to hitch a ride and raised my thumb. The car came by and then came slowly to a stop. I ran over. Two Mexicans were driving. They asked me in Spanish where I was going. I asked them where they were going and they told me Guadalajara. That is where I want to go I told them. They asked me for diez dolares. I said fine and got out the ten bucks. I climbed aboard and we drove all the way to Nogales just outside the border. At that point they took out some shotguns and hid them under the hood. I walked around Nogales and bought a bottle of some yellow stuff, almost like eggnog. I changed my dollars into pesos and suddenly I felt really rich with the pesos twelve to one. When I got back to the car, they told me they were ready to go. Vamos, andale. 

I climbed in and we took off, down south of the border. I was in Mexico finally. They drove non-stop, day and night, while I sat in the back drinking that yellow stuff, which was sweet and good. 

They drove down along the coast. I kept waking up somewhere else, my head leaning out the window. At night, by a gas station, huge insects the size of lizards were circling around the lights. Jack Kerouac, indeed. The Mexicans filled up the gas tank, and we went back “on the road” accompanied by the strong scent of gasoline. 

I fell asleep again. When I awoke, feeling groggy, I saw a tarantula crossing the road and the car just crunched over it. I asked if I could go back to get it for a souvenir. “No, hombre,” they said. We were close to Mazatlan. We stopped at a bar to get something to eat. Not knowing what to order I got a glass full of raw clams. I put on what I thought was ketchup and it ended up being hot sauce. I ran out screaming with pain.

We drove down to Tepic. We stopped again at a hole in the wall place to eat. There were so many flies that it was as if they were part of the meal. This was definitely the Third World. The drivers kept talking in Spanish, and I did not understand them. Finally we got to Guadalajara. “Esta aqui Hombre!” I got out of the car. “Gracias, mucho,” I said. That much I knew. 

I was in a park and not sure what to do or ask for next. “Baño? Baño por favor?” I had to go to a bathroom badly. I asked someone who led me to a place a couple of blocks away. It turned out to be a spa. I went in and took a shower, well needed, and a steam bath. A boy asked me if I wanted a beer, and I accepted. He brought me the bottle of beer. Then I got a massage, if you can call it that. He was cracking my back and twisted me around like pizza dough. I thought he was trying to kill me he was so rough. When it was over and I got dressed, the bill was around fifty pesos. At the time the exchange rate was twelve pesos to one dollar. I did not know what to tip. 

I walked to another public square and there I met Juan, a student from the University of Guadalajara. He spoke English and he told me his mother owned a pension and maybe I would want to live there at three dollars a day, including all my meals. Great deal, I thought. His friend joined us and I realized they were gay. They were hoping I would be interested. No, gracias.

I got this great room with a marble floor and a balcony. The next day I went to the open market, which was huge. I ate right off the stands, including an orange with chili sprinkled on top. It seemed everything had chili, sweet or not.

Before long I was able to speak Spanish somewhat, learning fast. It was surprising that you did not need to use pronouns when asking for something. Rather than say “I would like” you just said “Like food.” No subject. “Quero, una cerveza. Me gusta mucho.” Even curse words like “icho de chingara” or “chinga madre.” I kept hearing outrageous expressions everywhere I went. 

In the marketplace, I took photos of children who seemed lost. Or the many packs of abandoned dogs which I saw everywhere. The town was high up, about 5000 feet, so the air felt pure, and the sky was magnificent. 

Once I met two elderly tourists who guided me to a place they wanted me to see. We went inside to an empty room. The walls were stucco. An older woman inside had these little statues on a table, all of them of a sexual nature. One of them stood out: it was a priest in front of an altar praying. When you lifted the altar up, it revealed the priest having sex doggy-style with a woman on her knees. That was a bit of a turn off. It was not what I expected to find in Mexico. 

Charles Rotmil, Boy on Bike (Mexico) (Photograph © Charles Rotmil, 1960/2013)

Juan loaned me a bike. I biked alone to Lago Chapala and the town of Ajijic about 45 kilometers from Guadalajara. I was just above the town of Ajijic when suddenly the derailleur chain came off and locked the gears. The bike came to a sudden stop. A bus right behind me almost hit me when it veered right past me with its brakes screeching. I flew over the handlebars and hit the hard surface of the road, scraping my legs and hands. I got the chain back on and got right back on the bike. I stopped at a small farm by the road and asked for water. The farmer led me to a well and he dropped a bucket into it and came up with this greenish liquid and I drank from it. As I would learn later, a big mistake. 

It was downhill all the way to the village below. Ajijic was a village popular with expats who live there cheaply. I walked to the lake, which was slowly getting eaten up by water lilies. In the distance I saw a horse up to his neck in the water, then, a young woman bathing with the sun behind her. Both the woman and the sun blinded me. In the mountain range were sleeping volcanoes, waiting for their day to erupt. Bucolic views all around.

After a few hours of exploration I took a bus back to Guadalajara, one of those buses jammed with people and the top loaded with suitcases and boxes and my bike as well. When I got back to the pension I had a raging attack of diarrhea. Yep, I got Montezuma’s revenge, the dreaded disease, from amoebas or something else in the water I drank from that well. I thought I was dying. I lay feverish in bed for three days. The lady in the pension came by to comfort me with water and with damp towels. The attack went away in three days. You would think I learned my lesson, but maybe not, because I kept eating off the street vendors or in the marketplace and took more chances. I did not care. I loved the street food.

Meanwhile, I kept getting into accidents. A couple of days later I was biking around town, my head low on the racing bike, when I hit a man head on. I mean head to head. Nothing happened to him but my forehead was cut wide open. I took a cab to a hospital where they gave me some shots and stitched me up. 

Then a few days later I woke up real early and went to take a shower. I wanted hot water so I turned on the gas full blast to heat it but nothing happened, I lit a match and brought it to the gas. The flame was blown off. I lit another match while the gas was still going full blast. Suddenly, the entire room exploded. I saw a flash of light all around me. As if I was surrounded by flames. I was blinded by the explosion. I held a towel to my face and everyone came down to see what happened. Again I was rushed to a hospital. They gave me shots of cocaine in both arms. The protective skin over my eyeballs had burned off. More cocaine drops in both eyes and I was given a salve for my eyes as well. When I got back to the pension, I sat at a table with everyone and we played cards. I could barely see what I was doing, but I wanted to prove I was doing fine in spite of it all.

In a few days I healed. Before you knew it I was out taking photos with my Nikon S2 Rangefinder camera back in the marketplace and the area where silversmiths were working and the mariachi bands were playing. There were cheap beers and cigarettes named Faro, which were so thin they would fall apart while you smoked them. The matches cost more than the cigarettes. The market was filled with the smell of cheap oily chicken soup and refried beans. And always those oranges with chili powder sprinkled on top.

Charles Rotmil, Barata (Mexico) (Photograph © Charles Rotmil, 1960/2013)

After a month, it was time for me to return to New York and face the music of my divorce. I told everyone I had to leave. They used a teletype machine to contact a friend of theirs, Dolores, and asked her to show me the town of Nuevo Laredo before I crossed over to Laredo, Texas.

I went to the American consulate and told them I had read somewhere that one could accompany a dead body back home for a free train ride. Not sure if they understood me or not, but they gave me a free ticket to the border by train. If there was a body aboard, I never saw it. On the way up, we stopped in Querétaro, where, I was told, Maximilian was shot during the Revolution. The next train was at two. But they did not tell me it was two in the afternoon the next day. So I had to find a place to sleep. I found this place that had many small rooms each with a bed using newspapers for a mattress. It cost around 80 cents, so I did not mind much. 

While walking to this place, a young girl, maybe fourteen, asked me if I wanted sex for ten pesos. I gave her the money but moved on. Instead, I went to sleep, got up late, made it to the train station, and got to the border in a few hours. 

I had been told in Guadelajara to wait for Dolores, their friend who would show me the town, at a public square. I did not know what to do so I wandered around the square. Before I knew it, a man who looked like W.C Fields asked me if I wanted to have some fun. “There is a place I go to where girls drop their clothes into a hat. Real fun. Want to go? My treat.” 

So I went with him to a courtyard in back of a house. We were the only ones there. It was cold being December. I thought the south was warm but I was wrong. A man came and served us a beer. I had exactly ten dollars on me at the time. I had planned to hock my camera once I got back to the states and take a bus home to my close friend and ex-lover, Alisson.

The man who brought the beer suddenly laid out a large cloth with numbers on it. He gave a cup filled with dice to W.C. Fields. W.C. threw the dice on the cloth and won. The tall man laid out five twenties. W.C. said to me, “Why don’t you throw the dice, my treat.” So I did. I could not tell what came out, there were so many dice. “You won,” he said, and showed me the five twenties. “This is yours, just show me a twenty.” I said, “I don’t have a twenty.” “You don’t,” he said? “How will you get back to NYC.” “I don’t know,” I said. The tall man took the cloth away and it was all over. “What about the girls,” I asked. “Too cold for that,” Fields said.

I went back to the park and after an hour or so a man in a car stopped by. “Are you waiting for Dolores?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “Climb in, she is busy right now, let me show you the town.” We drove around the town and then out of it. He stopped by a row of tiny cabins, one next to the other. Women stood up in front of each door, most of them old and fat. Prostitutes, he explained to me. It is legal in Mexico. Gambling isn’t. There was a policeman there and the man showed the policeman his own handgun, which he had taken out of the glove compartment. They compared guns. My man’s was better than the policeman’s. 

Then he drove me further out, and I could see the town from afar in a field. I said I had to go to the bathroom, and he said I could go right there. I got out of the car and figured this was the end of the line for me. I got out and took what I thought was my last piss. Nothing happened. Instead the man drove me back to the village square. It was getting dark and he said to wait there and Dolores would show up soon.

A car pulled up with a broken window in the back. “Come on in,” a young woman said to me. She was good-looking, petite, and she wore a sequined silver dress tight as could be. We went to a bar and sat in a booth. She ordered some beers for us. Then we danced on the floor. “No me quites,” she whispered. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was getting aroused just dancing with her. Then we took off to a motel. She had arranged for everything. As soon as we got into the room she took off her clothes and so did I and we wasted no time in getting it on. She was a fully formed woman, zaftig I guess. I was for a moment in heaven. So that is what they meant by showing me the town. When we were done after about an hour, she got up and got dressed. She said she had to go home to her kids. It was a strange gift from Guadalajara. 

In the morning I got into town somehow and went right to the consulate. I told him about the W.C. Fields team. “Oh those, well, you have to watch out for them. They rip off tourists all the time. Nothing we can do about them. Not within our jurisdiction.” I asked for help to get back to the States. “What do you mean? You just have to cross the bridge.” And he gave me a pack of Pall Malls, even though I did not smoke.

I crossed the bridge and paid the two bucks to do so. On the other side, I found a Salvation Army store and they had an organ. I knew some pieces by heart, from my marriage to a pianist: a Bach Anna Magdalena prelude that Bach had written for his wife. The minister was impressed and he let me pick any coat I wanted from the rack of used coats. I found a trench coat, thanked him, and took off for the road. I thought I could hitch a ride back to New York. I crossed Texas with a man who kept saying as we drove past emptiness, “Great cattle country.” I did not know what he was talking about, maybe he meant for grazing. He only went so far, and I got another ride with a pseudo-cowboy. He was heading for New Orleans. It got dark and he offered to stop in a motel. I went along with that. We got a room and sure enough during the night, he approached me in bed and tried to touch me. I refused, of course. I could not understand whether he was a homosexual or a predator. 

The next day I took for the road again to hitch a ride and this time I was stopped by the police. They had me put my arms up on the roof of their car and went through my knapsack. “What is this about?” “There is a prison nearby and someone escaped.” They looked at all my photo negatives. They let me go and I finally got a ride to New Orleans. I was shocked to find that it was freezing there. I thought the south was always warm. I was wrong. 

It was a Sunday and I was hungry. I asked a bum what he did for food. Why not find out how they lived. It is a moot point between a road traveler and being homeless. 

He told me of a Baptist Mission and I went there. The minister in charge told me to come back later. I was famished but he told me that the meal was later. I walked around some more and did see the streetcar named Desire roll by. It does exist. When the time rolled around I went back to the Baptist Mission and stood in line with other people from all walks of life, people in used army clothes, Eisenhower jackets, and trench coats. We finally got in and got a meal and shower ticket. You had to take a shower before the meal. A kind of baptism I thought. It was like a scene out of a concentration camp. Naked men in all shapes and sizes, mostly gaunt. Not the place to think of dignity. I took a shower, dried myself. We had coffee made from chicory, fake coffee at best, and some kind of thin soup and bread. It filled me up. 

We then had to wait a while in a sitting room with other men, reading magazines. I found the copy of GQ for September 1960. This was from before I left New York. I was hanging out in Washington Square when a photographer asked me to model some sweaters. The photographer used a view camera, 8×10, and he was traveling through the village to find “beatniks.” It so happened I was relaxing, an unemployed philosopher, at the Washington Square Fountain. At the time, I lived not too far away in the East Village on 10th Street and Avenue B.

Charles Rotmil as a “beatnik” in GQ, September 1960 (Photograph by Emma Gene Hall)

I guess they took me to be a Beatnik. We went to an alley and I happened to have Howl by Ginsberg, which got into the photo of me leaning against an alley wall. And then we went to the Café Bizarre and took more photos. So here I was, down and out, in New Orleans, seeing photos of myself as a fashion model.

Finally we gathered to an assembly hall to hear a lecture. A man was sitting at a small organ and started to play some tunes on it, while swaying from side to side. The minister started his lecture, giving us advice about leading a better life, and when he got to the part about Jesus, I fell asleep. 

When I woke up, it was over and we were led to a huge room, which was not heated, and I got to sleep on an upper bunk bed. It seemed as if I barely fell asleep when were awoken, asked to get dressed and have breakfast. More Chicory coffee, the fake stuff, and porridge. And then they asked us to leave for the day.

I made my way to the center of town and found a shop where I pawned my Nikon for just enough to get bus fare back to New York City. I did not want to hitchhike anymore.

In the bus station a man came up to me and asked “Snakken Norsk?,” meaning did I speak Norwegian. “Why?” I asked. “Well I thought maybe you were Norwegian or Dutch. We need another man on a ship I am on.” I was tempted to have another big adventure just like that. But I did not accept.

I made it back to New York City without hitchhiking, slept most of the way, and I got back to my ex-lover’s apartment. I rang the door once and when she opened it I fell into her arms. We made love for days. 

When I left for this trip I was fresh from studying with Harold Feinstein in New York City in his loft. He implanted honesty in my concept of photography. No cropping of images. No using the rangefinder and setting it on one exposure for the day. Just aim and shoot without looking at the rangefinder. Later when I returned to New York I happened to go to a class run by Alexey Brodovitch, who was then editor of Vanity Fair. He loved the photos I took in Mexico. He showed them to his class. “This is it.” He recommended I go for an interview at Magnum Photos, the international photography cooperative founded by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and others. When they saw my photos, they knocked them down and told me I did not meet their standards. So it went. Just another example of how I missed the boat many times. I was left behind, while others moved ahead of the pack.

I swore I would never hitchhike again. Now I was ready to face the music of my impending divorce and the building of a new life.

In 1958, I was living in a room on 10th Street in Manhattan between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. I was paying $6 a week, and a fellow named Dan Balaban collected the rent for the landlord. Each week residents in the building gathered downstairs in Dan’s apartment, a large living room on the ground floor, and played poker for our rent, trying to win it back. (The rents on that street now average $4000 a month.) I was recently separated from my wife who had taken off with another man. We tried to reconcile our differences; we had three children, but to no avail. After almost going crazy, I adapted to what I eventually saw as a new freedom and a chance to start living again. I got a job working for Wolf book binding company for 90 cents an hour. Everyone in my apartment building seemed to be a writer. Vera M. floated from room to room, including my own, to make love with no strings attached. I may be wrong about that; you will have to check with her. 

At the time, I read whatever I could get my hands on by Henry Miller. A close friend of mine used to read Miller out loud (we did that with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I finally got to see with Bert Lahr in the title role) and started a correspondence with him. Miller wrote back and said he did not have time for us to visit him, as he was so busy that even if Jesus himself came to the door, he would be unable to answer. 

One morning Vera M. came to my door and said her boyfriend, the one she was closest to, Howard Kanovitz, was going to drive to Los Angeles. Would I like to come along? When, I asked. Tomorrow morning. Yes. 

I packed a small attaché case with some underwear, t-shirts, a French Grammar book, and my Nikon S2 rangefinder camera. That was it. I returned an oboe I had been renting from Sam Ash on 46th Street in Manhattan, and I was ready to go. I showed up the next day at Howard’s loft. Larry Rivers kept a studio in the same building. I got into the car, a large convertible bathtub, and we started out of Manhattan to find Route 66 and drive all the way to Los Angeles. By the time we got into Pennsylvania, Howard asked me to drive a bit. I told him I did not have a license and could barely drive. (My only real experience was driving a tractor on a farm in Saratoga Springs in 1947, as part of a summer job.) He was shocked but did not kick me out of the car. To add insult to injury, I barely had any money. I had applied for unemployment and I had to wait for the checks, at that time it would have been $35 a week. This required getting to California to apply for an out-of-state claim.

In the car, there were four of us. Another young woman sat in the back with me, but she kept her distance. Of course, I was dying to know her better but no such luck. I slept chastely in the back seat with her, while Howard and Vera slept in motels. Eventually we got to the Midwest after a seemingly endless drive through nowhere. We actually drove through a ghost town, where the mine had run dry. Some people stood still as specters as we drove by. We kept going west. 

We looked at the map and saw Terre Haute, so we asked someone where it was. I kept pronouncing it “Terre Haute” as if it was in French, and he could not understand me. We showed him the map and he said, “Oh you mean Terry Howdy!” We were still miles away from the Grand Canyon, an anticipated stop. We finally did get there and we gaped at the giant hole. I did not know what to make of it. It was a natural wonder to be sure, but I could not see why it attracted so many people.

We eventually drove past Needles, one of the hottest spots on earth, and arrived in Los Angeles, after a week of travel covering nearly 3000 miles. Howard stopped the car in Hollywood and said, “Okay, here we are.” I got out of the car and said, “What am I going to do?” He shrugged, “I have no idea.” He did give me the phone number of a friend he and Vera were seeing and suggested I give them a call. Maybe we could get together. 

I stood there in the street on Wilshire Boulevard under a hot, blazing sun, not realizing the Strip was 30 miles long. There was no way could I walk anywhere very far. So I went to a bank and cashed a check I carried as a safety net and asked around for a place to rent. I found a house that had a rental sign and an elderly woman came to the door with a Chihuahua. She told me she was renting out the back porch, a make-shift, screened in bungalow for $6 a week. I took it. It worked out fine. I got a job working for Alcoholics Anonymous as a coffee cup washer. No joke!! My job was to clean coffee cups for the many meetings. One day I took a bus all the way to one of the beaches, walking around all day exposed to the sun. Coming from New York, I had no clue about the intensity of the sunlight in LA. When I got back to my room, I had a horrible case of sun poisoning. It took a week before it healed.

Soon after, I called the number Howard had given me and they invited me to come over. On the way, I bought some bikini underwear, having never seen them before, thinking they would be great for travel, and some Guerlain soap made from whale blubber. Thus equipped I showed up at Howard’s friend’s house. The man of the house told me he worked for the Defense Department on some secret research that he could not discuss with me. His wife was a bit flirtatious with me telling me that her friend was coming over, who she wanted me to meet. She warned me ahead of time to have no expectations, as she was a high-priced call girl. She had clients like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, as well as someone who took her to Mexico for a week of fun. After an hour or so, this amazingly beautiful woman showed up.

All three of us were in the living room and I told them about the soap I had bought, a box of three cakes, and the underwear. “Could we see it?,” they asked. Sure. I took my pants down and gave them a look. Then I was left alone with Gwen P., the friend’s professional name. She told me she only worked on dates set up by phone from a madam somewhere in L.A. She was not working now because she had “the rag on.” I had no clue what she meant by that but she explained it. Then we started to play some cards. All we did was cut the deck to see who had a higher card. She won several times and I told her I would give her something. I took my box of Guerlain soaps and gave her one of the cakes. She said she could not accept it. She never took gifts from men. I begged her to take it, as I wanted her to have it. It had a wonderful scent. Then she said she had to go home. It was late and the buses had stopped running. Everyone begged her to take me home; she hesitated and then finally said “Fine, come along.” 

We got into her VW bug and drove to Hollywood. We were stopped by a police car and the cop asked her if I was a trick. I had no clue what he meant by that. She explained I was just a friend and she was driving me home. On the way back we spilled out our life stories. For me this comprised the war years, my recent separation and so on. She told me she was married to a scientist who also worked for a secret military project but had quit because of moral reservations. She was now the breadwinner. She told me her husband thought of her as Joan of Arc because of her sacrifice. Some day they would retire, buy a hotel on an island, and live happily ever after. Her previous husband was now in a mental institution. When we got to my bungalow, she parked the car. Then suddenly we started to make out. As it happened I had a terrible toothache. She told me she would make love to me but could not this week. I told her that was fine.

She said, “Let’s go in the house and get some aspirins.” I found some, and we went to my room and resumed fooling around. Then she slithered down and said, “Slow or fast?” Again I had no idea what she meant. I said it did not matter. I quickly cried out “Slow down!!!” When she was done, she got up and called her husband to say she was delayed and would come home soon. That was the beginning of a two month affair. Sometimes I would wait in her car while she was with a john. She said lot of them just wanted to talk. 

One day she asked me if I wanted to go on a camping trip. Her husband hated camping. I agreed. We would go to a campground in Big Sur. I objected: Why not just go into the woods and pitch a tent?. 

So we took off one morning and went up Route 1 all the way to Big Sur, a spectacular drive along the coast high up over steep cliffs and the Pacific Ocean. We walked into the woods and pitched the tent. I was fine with that, except she warned me of rattlesnakes. That was no comfort, but she said that they do not strike at night, it was too cold, and I believed her. The next day we walked along the rocky coast and there were natural springs where one could just dip in, like a spa. The clouds were literally below us and stretched as far as the eye could see; it was like being in heaven. We visited a man whose house was photographed in Edward Weston’s The Family of Man. At the very beginning of the book, there is a shot of a nude, looking like a child born of the earth itself. Gwen knew the model, another call girl. At the house, I caught a shot of Gwen in a mirror and later on of myself. I shot Gwen in the shower, not a great shot, but she seemed to me at the time to be a truly amazing woman.

We saw the Nepenthe Inn but did not eat there, a scenic place perched on a cliff, still there I believe. We did not see Esalen, it did not exist then. Now it is more of a corporate retreat utilizing Gestalt and even nude therapy. When we were there it was nothing like that: just the Inn and some people who lived in shack-like houses and the natural springs and rocky wild coast. 

A couple of days later, Gwen said, “Let’s go see Henry.” I said, “Henry? Henry who?” “Miller,” she said. It blew my mind. As I mentioned earlier, I had a correspondence with Miller and so did a friend of mine, Gerhardt. We were both devotees of everything Miller had written. Gerhardt was a bibliophile like no other. He built an entire addition to his house for his books running the length of a small warehouse. Once he told me he had the works of Knut Hamsun in Norwegian!

Yes, Henry Miller. She had known Miller for years, hinting she knew him in more ways than one. She was not sure if he would let us in to see him. He lived up a mountain. So we got into the VW Bug and slowly made our way up. When we got to where he lived, Gwen parked the car and walked to the small fenced-in gate. Miller was a short distance away working on his garden with God knows which wife, a Japanese woman. Gwen went inside the gate, walked up to Miller and talked to him. She came back and said he was so busy he could not see me if I was Jesus. That sounded familiar!! I thought there was no way I could come all this way and not meet my idol.

I yelled out “Monsieur Miller!” in my best French. “Monsieur Miller!!!” He looked up from what he was doing, ears perking up, and almost ran over to me. When he got to the gate I told him I was French. I had written him many times and come come across the ocean and a whole continent just to see him. He welcomed me and Gwen in. We sat in the dining area, near the kitchen, and talked about anything and everything. Then he showed me his watercolors. We were in a sun-filled room and I looked at them but could not comment on them except to say that they were nice. 

We got back to talking about his books, especially the Tropic series. He commented: “Those are not my favorites. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch are my favorites.” His wife was silent in the background, walking with a broom. “We have problems with rattlesnakes and we always have to sweep them away.”

He then got up and walked to the back wall, which was really comprised of false panels. He slid them open, and there, in all their glory, were his books. At the time most of them were banned in the United States, and they had to be kept hidden away. He took out the Rosy Crucifixion books, the Tropics, the Smile, Big Sur, and inscribed them all to me, saying how happy he was to have met me. 

I was literally in heaven when I left him there. He was a saint in my book.

Gwen and I went to the edge of the sea, our feet dangling over the cliffs, with the clouds beneath our feet, as far as the eye could see. The sunset was magnificent. I do not remember what Gwen said to me, but I told her that sometimes it was better not to talk during sunsets. That remark ended the relationship. 

When I got back to Los Angeles my unemployment checks had arrived, totaling nearly four hundred dollars. I decided to say goodbye to everyone and take off for Mexico. 

I hitched a ride to Phoenix and slept on a pile of haystacks off the side of the road. At dawn, I saw a car in the distance and ran to the roadside and thumbed it down. Two Mexicans were going deep across the border and would give me a ride if I paid them ten dollars. They drove me all the way to Guadalajara. But that is, as they say, another story. 

P.S. When I returned to New York City, I loaned out all the inscribed Miller books and never got them back. They are no doubt once again hidden somewhere possibly behind a false wall, in someone’s collection of stolen books.

Photographs of Route 66 and Big Sur

Charles Rotmil
Howard Kanovitz at the Wheel

Charles Rotmil
On Route 66

Charles Rotmil
Boy in Front of House near Henry Miller’s House

Charles Rotmil
Same Window as Family of Man

Charles Rotmil
My Reflection in Big Sur House

Charles Rotmil
A Woman’s Reflection in Big Sur House

Charles Rotmil
Woman in Shower at Big Sur

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have never understood the impulse of some Burroughsians to quarantine the life and work of their idol. Why this desire to make Burroughs unique, to focus on his solitary nature, to deny his influences and origins? Me, I want the virus to spread and infect every aspect of our lives. If I can tie Burroughs and his work to sentimental Victorian romance novels (after all, he is connected through Nuttall to Victorian Boy’s Magazines), I will be happy to do it.

To get the full force of the Burroughs fix, it is all about set and setting. Check out the performance schedule for the American Theatre of Poets in 1965. You’ll see Burroughs reading there on St. Valentine’s Day of course, but look at all the other performances as well. Judson Theater dance people, Black Mountain College alums, Beat poets, New York School writers, avant-garde musicians, Art Happenings, Fluxus events. In the early and mid-1960s, this was the context for a Burroughs happening; these were the people in the audience for a Burroughs reading; these were the performances that took inspiration from Burroughs’ work.

Ephemera from the New York theater scene gives color to what often threatens to be a black and white portrait of Burroughs. In addition to photographs and reminiscences about the Living Theatre contributed by Charles Rotmil, I offer documentation from Burroughs’ St. Valentine’s Day Reading and some other ephemera from the New York theater scene. I think it assists in one’s perception of Burroughs and his work.

Off-Off-Broadway Theater Ephemera

American Theatre for Poets schedule
Winter-Spring 1965

New York Poets Theatre Variety Program
1962

New York Poets Theatre Variety Program
1962

New York Poets Theatre Variety Program
1962

Freedom for the Arts Handbill
22 April 1964

“No Fair” Handbill
22 April 1964

The Bridge Theater Program
Download the entire program (PDF)

I was pretty young and that was a crucial, formative period. But some part of me understood that I was in the right place at the right time. It was a hotbed of creativity because of John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Bob Dunn’s classes were based on Cage’s approach to musical composition, so we were actually learning Cage methods of indeterminacy and chance, which were very freeing technically in making dances. We didn’t have to take ourselves so seriously, though we were very serious about our work. John wasn’t at those classes, but he was certainly around the Cunningham studio and, for me, his influence was parallel, if not greater, than Merce’s. My aesthetic was born there, and in the work of many of us the vocabulary of movement is sort of dimensionless, not fixed in a recognizable technique. Robert Rauschenberg was a good model for us. He knew how to have a good time and gave a lot of parties in his loft. The first work I did at Judson was “Rain Fur.” I remember being on the floor and rolling over slowly. I started upstage and rolled downstage. Alex Hay, to whom I was married at the time, may have been in it, too, but I’m not sure. It was accompanied by Charles Rotmil playing a bamboo flute. — from Allen Hughes, “DANCE; A Place And Time To Find New Ways To Move,” New York Times (June 3, 2001).

Part of the world in motion back in the 1960s was the Living Theatre, which had a space on 14th Street and 6th Avenue. Robert Dunn ran a choreography workshop on the second floor, a small dance floor with bars and other equipement. Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer were part of it. I would hang out and sit quietly on the floor watching and taking photographs, as one of them did her dance, while reciting James Joyce. It was a new thing to do then and avant garde. Chance was all part of the game, as outlined by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The Living Theatre was downstairs, a complete little theatre, small and intimate. Once Cage gave four simultaneous lectures, three on tapes and one live. He stood talking, once about death, while the tape recorder went on about mushroom hunting and eventually all four were going at once. It was fascinating because my brain would try to focus on individual lectures, going from one to the other, as my brain would do the editing. I had to laugh because I thought I would lose my mind any moment. I went to almost all the plays the Living Theatre put out, often more than once. I must have seen Jack Gelber’s The Connection fifty times. They let me hang out and take pictures. And I did. I even went back once during the day and took some formal photos of Judith Malina and Julian Beck.  

Most recently I went to their new place in the basement of an old building not far from Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side. As before, they bring the audience into the play. In this instance they removed the seats, having everyone on an open floor acting with the actors. Still very much living theatre.

Back in the 60s, I would hang out backstage in the dressing room and watch the actors apply their make-up. One of them was drinking right out of a cough medicine bottle, saying to me it was for his voice, even though it was loaded with codeine then. It was a cheap way to get high legally, but for me it meant doing hard drugs. I feared getting hooked. Yet I had a taste of everything that was available then: pot from hookah pipes to ether from a cotton-soaked cup to scopolamine. I felt it was okay to try something once and be done with it. To this day, I tend to feel high most of the time, and I do not need the boost, especially if I am trying to focus.

The play that night was Luigi Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise, in which, very much like Six Characters in Search of an Author, the characters are dissatisfied with the writer and get rid of him and then eventually get rid of the director. I have a somewhat blurred photo showing Julian Beck being thrown off the stage.

The Connection is about a group of junkies waiting for the arrival of “Cowboy,” a black guy in a white suit. Not sure if it is a spoiler but he eventually does arrive. A jazz band played on stage live. During intermission, some of the actors wandered around begging for money to get a fix. It was real.

Some of the Living Theatre actors went off to Hollywood; even Judith Malina played Grandmama in an Addams Family movie. I met Charles Addams once at a rooftop party on First Avenue. He came in with his little dog, the RCA dog, with a black ring around his eye. I told Addams how I enjoyed one of his books, which had on its cover the Addams family moon bathing. Pugsley was playing in a sandbox. Addams asked if I noticed what he was doing there, “He is planting mushrooms.”

Photographs by Charles Rotmil of Luigi Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise Performed at the Living Theatre in the 1960s

Julian Beck being thrown off stage during the play