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An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions An Amateur Production Art & Laurie Becoming a Filmmaker Actors Hollywood Shooting in Echo Park & Silver Lake Art's World Drugs Music Deeper into Art's World The Movie Project Predictions |
Art Moves In click Here for a printable
page As for my daughterÉ Our visits continued for a while
according to the old arrangement, but shortly after a dreadful article about
Art appeared in Rolling Stone, I got a call from Barrett, my ex. In a rush permitting no interruption,
he said, "I just want to tell you that we're moving, in two days, to New
Jersey. You can say goodbye to
Maggie tomorrow at Mae's house."
A goodbye party had been hastily arranged. He hung up.
I
called my lawyer who said I couldn't stop them. He guessed that this last minute notification and the
party during which we'd be surrounded by people was to forestall any kidnap
attempt on my part. That would
never have occurred to me. The
Rolling Stone piece was written at her instigation by my cousin Evie's boyfriend at that time, a schmuck
named Grover Lewis. Charming and
lethal, he cozied up to me and Art and then implied in what he wrote that Art was loaded on heroin
during the interview. And what
he said Art said had not much to with what he did say. Grover called up the night before the
piece came out. He was drunk,
incoherent, and crying. He apologized
and said his editor had pushed him for a "darker" piece. After this, Evie told me blandly,
quoting somebody or other, that "Journalists are always selling somebody
out." The
piece inflamed Jeanne and Barrett's ongoing paranoia, and Barrett seized upon
a job in Princeton. They sold
their house for not enough money and hightailed it to the East, to a life
they later said they hated in order to escape me and the monster they read
about in Rolling Stone. Evie
owed me. So to this party, at my
encouragement, she invited some of her flashier friends, a hot young female
singer, some actors. Our guess
(correct) was that Jeanne and Barrett would be so dazzled by these stars,
they'd hover less, and I could get quiet a moment with my child. It
worked. While Jeanne and Barrett
stood, rapt, at the piano listening to Ronee Blakeley sing, I grabbed Maggie's
hand and took her upstairs where I told her I loved her and would miss her
and gave her a tiny heartshaped pendant I'd bought for myself at thirteen and
had been wearing ever since. And
then we heard ol' Jeanne come thumping up the stairs, screaming and
hysterical, "Margaret!
Margaret!" And there
she was: Big, bug-eyed, out of breath and white-faced in the doorway of the
room we sat in. Oh
well. I was not the demon Jeanne
took me for, but I was a rotten mother. And Jeanne was not such a good one,
as I was to learn, but she was there.
I hadn't been. I wasn't. After
this I had no distractions from the work I'd undertaken and nothing to
prevent me from being consumed by Art.
I established a routine with him. We met at my house on our lunch breaks. He drank ale, smoked and talked. I listened, questioned, prodded. I'd got him going chronologically,
starting with who his parents were and how they met. As I said, his initial enthusiasm
waned quickly. At the time,
unperceptive me, I just thought he was lazy. Much later I realized that Art brought to each session his
complicated, exhausting compulsion to perfect artistry. Art was never careless or casual in anything
he did -- least of all in this matter of his immortality. (Oh,
dear. What will happen to me in
this memoir now that Art is fully in the picture? Now that I feel myself, as usual, both swamped by him and
lifted, like a swimmer in a big wave?
I guess I'll just have to keep myself in view.) Anyway,
he drank a lot at these sessions and sometimes was clearly wrecked by more
potent substances. He got loaded
because he liked it and also to hush the constant self-critical voices in his
head and the doubt in his heart.
These cripplers were constant with him and later I saw how they
operated when he performed his music.
He dismissed his best work when he was sober but delighted in less
exciting stuff when high. As
we worked, I got to understand what was distancing him from me as I watched
him nod out in mid-sentence. It
was excruciatingly angering. I
wanted to kill him at those times. I found him repulsive and stupid. I'd watch his cigarette ash lengthen
and drop onto my madras-draped overstuffed chair or onto his pants. From my reclining position on the
floor, in the middle of my notes, notebooks, my own cigarettes and ashtray
and coffee, I'd call his name or kick at his foot and marvel at his smooth,
practiced surfacing. He'd
continue the sentence he'd drifted off in, sometimes logically. He'd tip his cigarette automatically
into the ashtray even if it was too late, glance, and brush away the fallen
ash. On those tapes I hear his
standard alibi, "I'm just tired, baby," and my snide, "Yeah,
yeah," or my nagging, and I wince.
I don't know who I disliked most at those moments, Art with his
defensive whiney lying, or me, the purse-lipped, persistent shrew. Years
later, I was able to get a handle on what enraged me at those times. It was as if he had willfully taken
away the man I knew and replaced him with some vaguely similar mumbly
asshole, and the infuriating part was that the asshole appeared to think I
was so stupid I wouldn't notice the switch. When I understood what was causing my pain, I managed to
distance myself. I gave the
asshole other names. Arthur,
spelled backwards, was the boozy nodder, "Ruhtra." "Reppep" was, with Art's
inevitable discovery of cocaine, the speedy one. In
'72, though, I just got mad, but bit my tongue. I was obsessed with the book, and Art became obsessed with
me again, and no wonder. I was a
sympathetic, insightful, eager listener, filled with wonder for what he told
me and how he told it. It was
made clear to him on a daily basis that absolutely nothing interested
me as much as he did. I
frequently cooked for him, worried about his health, his moods, and delighted
in his lovemaking -- though, now that drugs were in the picture, sex, for
him, was less compelling, and that was a disappointment, making me
grumpy. And grumpier, still when
I acknowledged that my occasional sexual frustration, like my jealousy, was a
blemish on the supposed perfection of my intentions So I kept quiet and demanded nothing of him, really,
but that he show up, remain conscious, and tell his story. I
didn't depend on Art for my social life. My cousin, Mirandi, and I renewed our friendship. We had lunch together, went to movies
and for walks and gossiped endlessly.
And I still loved to be alone.
Synanon hadn't knocked that out of me. I
can enjoy a meal at a restaurant with just a book for company, and I'm
puzzled by people who can't. I
can go for long walks, stopping for
occasional exchanges with strangers. On my walks in Venice, I brought my camera, shooting
color; that was new for me. But,
"Junior," Art's mother told me once, "always was one to run everything
into the ground." (I told
Art I would put that on his tombstone).
Art demanded more,
always, of anything. He
wanted more of me. He was sick
of living with Bob and Nikki. He
wanted us to get married. He
wanted to move in. I
liked things as they were. My
place was mine. Over my bed on
the white painted lath that was my wall, I'd carefully thumbtacked a complete
collection of snapshots from my life.
Me, at 7 in a New York winter, bundled in a coat and hat, grimacing
toothlessly at the feet of Peter Stuyvesant. My mother -- in brightly fading overexposed color -- on
our subsequent journey West.
Tanned and rested in the desert, in turquoise beads, a peasant
blouse. My daughter, my
cousins. Laid out like overlapping
tiles, here was a map of me. I
didn't want Art moving in, and it wasn't just because of the smoking,
drinking, and drugs -- good reasons; the ones I gave him. I'd been forced to cohabit for three
and a half years with crowds of certifiable crazies, and I wanted a room of
my own. I wasn't to have
it. Not then. |
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