Mother American Night Read online

  I already knew the city because during my senior year at Wesleyan, I’d shared an apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village with a couple of other guys from school, where I went on the weekends. The rent was twenty-eight dollars a month, total. There were so many cockroaches it was like a wildlife preserve.

  The apartment was right above the Dom, which Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey had just turned into a club. I went down there one night to get a drink and who should be singing but Nico. I was ready to follow her anywhere, but not much came of it because she was far too otherworldly for me. I went back to see her the next time she performed there, and that was when I met Rene Ricard.

  A poet and a painter who had already appeared in several Warhol films, Rene probably stood about five foot ten and weighed maybe 110 pounds. Back then, not many gay men were as far out of the closet as Rene was. The night I met him, I was wearing leather pants and he came right up to me and said, “Well, hello, cowboy,” and I thought, Well, aren’t you a special thing? And he was. What a piece of work. From that moment on, Rene was desperately in love with me.

  At one point during my senior year, I had to go up to Wesleyan because I was the only student member on the committee that decided whether or not students would be expelled, and Rene insisted on coming with me. School was out at the time, so there were only a few people around. I installed Rene in a room with a big bay window on the third floor of my fraternity house.

  One of the brothers was a serious climber who was constantly scaling miscellaneous walls around campus. Climbing up the face of the fraternity house that day, he looked through the window and saw Rene lying in bed in a translucent shirt eating strawberries and whipped cream while jerking off. That the climber did not fall off the wall right then still seems like a miracle to me.

  Rene was the one who took me to the Factory for the first time. It was a ragged scene. Just about everybody there was shooting speed except for Andy, who never took a drug in his life as far as I could tell. Edie Sedgwick was already gone, but Joe Dallesandro was still there, as was Ultra Violet, who even then had one wing on fire and half her tail shot off but was still astonishing. I was at the Factory quite often on those senior-year weekends, and that was where I began shooting speed.

  I’m still surprised that I never came down with hepatitis C. I was also shooting heroin, but I never copped on the street because while I may be crazy, I am not stupid. I always got it from a guy I trusted. You can actually live a long time as a junkie. The problem is that it’s really hard to get a truly reliable standardized titration. I went through heroin withdrawal and it was not fun, but then as Mountain Girl once said to me, “You’re the best little quitter I know.”

  I didn’t think shooting crank was glamorous. When everybody at the Factory started shooting up horse as well, I looked around one day and it seemed like all these brilliant, sparkly people had gone gray and lusterless. I just thought, Fuck, I don’t want to be one of them. There wasn’t anything glamorous about shooting heroin, either. It was just a way to pass the time. In a situation like that, you’re not just killing time, you’re murdering it.

  The Factory itself was in fact exactly that—a factory. The name wasn’t a metaphor, because they were manufacturing art. Andy would have these ideas and then say what he wanted done, and we’d all busily set about doing it. There are a couple of Warhol screen prints on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art that I worked on.

  Having a conversation with Andy back then wasn’t exactly like having a normal conversation, because the actual syllables leaving his lips were few and far between. However, he did have these very subtle emotive qualities that made it easier to understand him. I didn’t think of him as a master manipulator of people except in the sense that the sun is a master manipulator of planets. Andy was the white dwarf neutron star at the core of the entire scene. All the people around him were wildly flamboyant characters who talked all the goddamn time. But not Andy. He was just there, and he attracted all these other colorful orbital bodies. I was happy to be one of them for a spell. I wasn’t particularly attracted to the Factory because it was an art scene. I was attracted to it because it was one hell of a scene.

  When I moved back to New York again, in the fall of 1970, I had an especially sweet deal. I was staying with this gay couple, an older man and a younger man, who lived in a duplex at the Hotel des Artistes at 1 West Sixty-Seventh Street, near Central Park. They also had a farm in Putney, Vermont, where they would go all the time, and they told me I could be their house sitter in the city. The older man had been a colleague of my girlfriend’s father during the war so they were almost like family.

  The couple would periodically throw these parties where big-deal guys who happened to be closeted gays would come down from their family mansions in Greenwich, Connecticut, so they could let their hair down. Believe it or not, I was kind of cute back then, and the couple paid me to mince around at these gatherings, giving the impression that they were both fucking me so I wasn’t quite available to anyone else. I was just supposed to flirt with the guests and make them happy that way. By doing this, I think I learned something about what it was like to be a woman. These men would come on to me, and I would respond by flirting with them in a girlish sort of way. So for me, it was actually a wonderful experience.

  The parties themselves were incredible. Gay life in pre-Stonewall America was a horrible thing. It really was. These were all good guys who really did love their families, but the only time they could ever be themselves was when they came to these parties in the city.

  The other thing that was going on while I was living at the Hotel des Artistes was that oral birth control pills were pretty much universally available for the first time. Radical feminists had told women that they were no different from men and therefore should be just as sexually ravenous. Aside from syphilis, there were no major sexually transmitted diseases. There were also lots of quaaludes, which had a somewhat limited utility because, as someone once said, they turned women into animals and men into vegetables. Happy vegetables, but still.

  All in all, it was a hell of a good time to be in New York, which for me has always been the capital of magic and longing. Back then, New York was a great place to get laid, but not a great place to stay laid, and so I was seeing a pretty fair amount of action.

  Then I went to this party where I met some Argentinian rich boys from good families who told me they were bringing kilos of pure pharmaceutical-grade cocaine into the United States. One of them said they were having a difficult time finding a distribution network. I thought about their problem and asked a friend of mine who lived in Spanish Harlem if she knew anybody who dealt cocaine, and she said she did.

  Because my Spanish was really shitty and barely turista, I took her as my interpreter and met with a couple of Puerto Rican guys who were no joke, man. I said, “I will bring you a kilo of cocaine that I have divided into honest ounces and have not cut or touched in any way. This is an affordable amount for you guys, right?” They said it was, and then I told them they could buy as many ounces as they could afford. What they then did with the stuff was not my business. What I did was provide them with pure coke.

  The first time we did a deal, they bought the whole kilo for about six or eight grand in cash, mostly in hundreds. Before the money changed hands, they did some themselves to see if it was really good. Generally, I was not doing any of it. I was just into the danger.

  I brought the money to the Argentinian guys and took my cut, which was 20 percent. The money wasn’t all that important to me, and I thought 20 percent was a pretty modest fee, considering I had actually put much more work into it than they had.

  This began happening on a weekly basis. My theory was that once the Puerto Rican guys established that I really was doing what I said, I would be too valuable for them to waste. I knew that every time I rode away from them on my BMW with a bunch of their cash in
my pocket as they were holding the cocaine, the temptation to blang me off my motorcycle had to be there. By then, I had begun carrying a gun with me in certain parts of the city. It was a .38 FBI model and because this was New York City, I was supposed to have it registered but I did not. The Puerto Rican guys were packing heat as well. They knew I was armed because I was behaving in a way that would indicate I was either truly crazy or I was armed.

  This all went on for the better part of three months, until a motorcycle magazine asked me to write an article about taking a brand-new BMW motorcycle across the country and then back again. The whole time, I had been waiting for Farrar, Straus and Giroux to figure out what they were going to do with my novel. But as I geared up to leave, I still hadn’t heard anything from them.

  While I was on that cross-country trip, I had more than one Easy Rider moment. In New Jersey, a no-necked barbarian tried to kill me by running my bike off the road with his Dodge Super Bee muscle car. When I scrambled off into the bush where he couldn’t follow, he came out of his car with a pistol. He pointed it at me, and then his wife, who had apparently been asleep in the back seat, rose up and started shouting at him. He shook his head, threw the gun down in the front seat, got back into the car, and drove away. We never even said a single word to each other.

  I kept riding west until I got to Rawlins, Wyoming, a truly godforsaken town in the middle of the state. It’s a dreadful place, best known as the home of the Wyoming State Penitentiary. The only good thing about Rawlins was a now long-gone place called the Flame Café, which was where my parents had liked to stop while driving down to Cheyenne.

  I had a warm, familial feeling about the Flame Café because it was an old haunt for me. But this time when I walked through the front door, I was no longer the fair-haired boy who used to come in with Senator Barlow. I had long hair, I was in my motorcycle leathers, and I had been riding in the rain for an hour or so. I was a freak. I was the other. I was somebody who was against the war in Vietnam. I was the reason that America was no longer great.

  I sat down at a table and ordered the lamb roast, and it took a really long time coming. There also seemed to be a fair amount of commotion going on in the kitchen along with a lot of dark laughter. Eventually, the waitress came out with this skinned raw lamb’s head with the eyes still in it, lying in a pool of blood, on a stainless steel platter. She put it down in front of me.

  Everyone in the restaurant was watching me. I knew I was in a situation where everyone could have just fucking beaten me to death and nobody would have ever found out. What they wanted me to do was react and start shouting. Instead, I just got to my feet and walked very slowly and carefully through the door. Then I got back on my bike and rode like hell out of Rawlins, Wyoming.

  I made it to California and then rode back to the East Coast, only to learn that Farrar, Straus and Giroux had given me back my novel. I found an agent who began shopping it around again, but it just kept getting rejected. The only consolation was that the motorcycle magazine liked my article so much that they let me keep the bike.

  What came next for me was a period of utter confusion and massive self-doubt. I moved in with an ex-girlfriend with whom I had once been obsessed. Although we were no longer in a state of connubial bliss, we were sharing a bed in a nondescript apartment in a nondescript building in Middletown.

  I began thinking that maybe I could reapply to Harvard Law School, but my desire to do that had been considerably reduced by the realization that if I became a lawyer, my job would be to constantly sow doubt, fear, paranoia, and distrust. I knew I wouldn’t be any good at doing that because it was something I wouldn’t have wanted to be good at. I was really at loose ends with no idea what I was now supposed to do with my life.

  FIFTEEN

  MEXICALI BLUES

  I drove out to California in late December and stayed there through January, and that was when I really got to know Jon McIntire. By then, Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia had already written “Uncle John’s Band” about him, and he was about to become the manager of the Grateful Dead.

  Physically, he was a classically beautiful man in the post-Raphaelite style. He had long flowing blond hair, aristocratic features, and the bearing of one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. It was bumpkin nobility, the kind that only comes from truly being from the provinces. I always felt like a complete barbarian around him because Jon was such a ridiculously elegant person in the way he carried himself.

  Jon was from Belleville, Illinois. He had gone to Washington University in St. Louis and so was well educated and extremely literate but also an astonishingly adept autodidact. He then went to San Francisco State, where he met Rock Scully and studied German phenomenology. That was where he also met Rock’s friend Danny Rifkin, who introduced Jon to the Dead.

  Part of what brought us together was that I was studying German phenomenology myself and had just been reading Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and that whole sick crew. It kind of blew Jon away that there was anyone else who actually knew anything about any of this, especially someone wearing a cowboy hat.

  Within the Grateful Dead scene itself, very few people knew Jon was gay. Garcia must have known, but he couldn’t have cared less. The real dominant strain in the culture of the band, which few people recognize, came straight out of Pendleton, Oregon, through roadies like Rex Jackson and the Hagen brothers, who were real cowboys and as macho as they came.

  Jon himself was not a lookist. It was always the other party’s mind that interested him. For him, it was always about love rather than cruising. Jon also never wanted to have a relationship with anybody but a straight guy that he had somehow managed to turn.

  I went to see the Dead on New Year’s Eve at Winterland and was living at Weir’s until Jon lured me over to his place. I was staying there with him when he and Weir and I cooked up a plot to go to Mexico together in a three-cylinder, two-stroke Saab that broke down during our trip every day at the exact same time, about four-thirty or five in the afternoon.

  I would be standing by the side of the road with the hood up alongside all these solemn Mexicans in straw hats and white shirts who had just seemed to suddenly precipitate out of thin air so they could look at this engine that was not at all familiar to them. At one point, I had to sew the fan belt together so we could keep on driving. We stayed in pretty cheap hotels and were muy borracho a good deal of the time, because we were on an expedition. We were not smoking too much weed, but we were snorting a little blow.

  One night, we were all trying to get into a very fancy nightclub in Mexico City. We told them we were Los Grateful Dios, but they didn’t know anything about that. Then we told them that we were Los Rolling Stones. They knew about them but were not particularly impressed. So then we told them we were with Los Creedence Clearwater Revival and they went nuts. They loved them. Everywhere we went in Mexico, we heard Creedence.

  I was sitting in the Saab in a mercado in Guadalajara one day when I heard Kris Kristofferson singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on the radio. The song totally blew me away because I could relate to the story of it so completely. I had never written any lyrics before, but that song inspired me to think that maybe I could.

  Weir had a gig back in the United States and so we reluctantly sent him off. Jon really wanted something to happen with me, and I was thinking, “Better to be bisexual, surely.” I figured this would more than double my opportunities because I could always get laid with a guy.

  We eventually ended up in this completely isolated village called Puerto Angel on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, about 150 hard miles of dirt from Oaxaca. The only electricity in the town was devoted to running the beer coolers and the jukebox at the cantina, which blared out wall-to-wall Los Creedence at maximum volume.

  I decided this was the time for me to find out about this whole bisexuality thing. Jon and I gave it a shot, but it was absolutely not working for
me. We got into bed together and did a lot of naked thrashing about but not much more because it all felt too weird. Jon had stubble on his face and it didn’t smell right because he was a guy. We kissed each other because we could do that, but I didn’t get the feeling that it was ever going to be anything but strange.

  Jon was a dramatic fellow and after it didn’t happen between us, he pouted for a while. Then we got drunk together and had a conversation about it and the cloud lifted and we became even deeper friends than we had been before.

  We returned to San Francisco, and I drove back to Wyoming in my El Camino. I stayed with my folks for a little while and then flew back to Connecticut, where I was still living in that nondescript apartment with the girlfriend with whom I was not having sex. And that was where I eventually sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Mexicali Blues.”

  SIXTEEN

  SUGAR MAGNOLIA

  In February 1971, the promoter Howard Stein brought the Grateful Dead to the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, to perform a series of shows. He decided to invite the entire Dead family to come along and rented a great big old mansion in Dutchess County, where we all stayed like kids in a dormitory. I was in a room with Billy Kreutzmann and Ramrod, and Kreutzmann told me he was going to kill me if I didn’t stop fucking this smoking-hot girl who was so beautiful that it really felt sublime to have sex with her even though we were in the same room as Kreutzmann and Ramrod.

  It was a ten-day stand in Port Chester, and at one point in the proceedings, Rex Jackson turned me upside down and shook me by my heels because he thought I might have some cocaine on me that he very much wanted to snort at that moment. As it happened, I did not.

  One night during the run, Robert Hunter and Weir were trying to work on a song in a back room at the Capitol Theatre, and it was not going well at all. This came as no surprise to me because Hunter is irascible and Bobby is impossible. Bobby is lovely and sweet and smart and wonderful and talented and so well qualified to be my official best friend, but he can sometimes be a pain in the ass. He is also pretty much not controllable in any way. You can’t tell Weir to do anything. If you do, you have just decreased your chances that he will do it.