Edie (50 page)

She kept telling me that she expected, when the mitts came off, that she would have grotesque, deformed, webbed hands. When Dr. Roberts finally took the mitts off, she was excited and very surprised. Her hands were in perfect shape.

She looked fabulous in everything! At Max’s it was as if Queen Elizabeth had arrived. I remember going out with her in the afternoon when she had on what she called her mini evening gown. She’d seen a full-length velvet gown in the window at Bergdorf s trimmed in egret feathers. She went in and bought it, and because the mini skirt was in such vogue then, she had the evening dress cut to mini size and had the feathers put back on. That was her “mini” evening gown. Over that she wore a black ostrich-plume coat, peacock-feather earrings, and black satin gloves up to here with ostrich-plume bows on the top. For broad daylight in the East Village she was incredible! With a huge black straw hat over it.

We went to Coney Island like that. She took her first and only subway ride in New York. The people on the train just loved her. She never sat down the whole way out—the train was so crowded we stood all the way from the East Village to Coney Island. She was in all that mad regalia with a bikini underneath so we could go swimming. The people loved her. She was talking to everyone and getting along. We rode in the first car so she could look out of the window in the front. She was fascinated by the tunnels and the weaving of the train and the clacking. Just fabulous. She’d never experienced anything like it.

We did everything. We had cotton candy; ate hot dogs at Nathan’s; we went on the parachute jump, the roller-coaster; we went swimming in the surf and lying in the sun. We collected shells and rocks and brought back two completely chewed corncobs for souvenirs. We did everything. The funhouse. She was just incredulous . . . all wild-eyed and goo-gaa. The distortion mirrors. And the laughing and the laughing.

She screamed all the way up and all the way down the parachute
jump, the big peacock-feather earrings standing straight out from her head. We got on the log sluice ride with those big silicone logs, and you came down this big sluice, and water splashed over her feathers and hat and everything, and she just loved every minute of it. I took her on the ride where the man in the gorilla costume chases after your car—one of those spook-house things. She just
loved
him, carrying on with him and asking him into the car with us.

On the carrousel she rode the swan—a double- or triple-seater with the silhouette of a swan on either side. She said, “Birds of a feather ought to stick together.”

We went swimming—leaving all this velvet and feathers strewn all over the beach in the midst of these Puerto Rican people and black people and everything. We went way over our heads swimming. Then we came home on the subway with all the rush-hour crowds. The front car both times. Oh, she just loved it! We came home so exhausted.

She was happy at Margouleff’s. I never left her for a minute, even when she went to work. We’d go to the banks together. I remember going down to pick up the trust-fund checks and having her pay for the cab with a pearl-and-diamond ring one day. He refused to wait. He took the ring when he read the carat weight inside.

She had on a big star-sapphire ring which she said was worth twenty-five hundred dollars. It fell out of the setting three times to my knowledge, and she kept putting it back in. The fourth time it fell out onto the dance floor; she got annoyed with it and just stomped and pounded it into the dance floor and threw the setting across the room. She left the sapphire embedded in there. Edith wasn’t bothered by things like that. She was just fabulous!

We used to share the same bed every night. It wasn’t that I had to watch her, we were just that close. In the morning I used to try to feed her omelets and stuff, but she just wouldn’t hear about it. She wanted cold shrimp and milkshakes. I’d say, “Edith, please. You’re on the Lower East Side, honey. Come down a little.”

“I just want what I want . . . what I’m used to.”

“Come on, honey,” I’d say. “You’re making it very difficult for me. I have to make you up, bathe you, I have to do all this crap. I have to have a good time with you, and yet you want me to go out and buy fucking gourmet food at nine in the morning.”

In the beginning I had to help her put on her make-up because her hands were these big mitts. I had to put the eyelashes on, and zip her up, and help get her bra on, and this and that. I knew how to do makeup because I had studied it at the Fashion Institute. She’d sit on the
stool in the kitchen with five hundred bottles of make-up spread out on the counter. I made her tell me exactly what she wanted. She’d point with her big stumps and say, “Make it darker there,” or whatever. She was very big on the black make-up. At the time she stI’ll had a few light burns on her face that I covered up with foundation make-up.

I used to have to bathe her. I’d put plastic around the bandages with rubber bands to keep them tight. She’d been there a week and she hadn’t taken a bath. She’d say, “Oh, my bandages . . . this, that, l’ll get this wet.” She went through stages where she was very unclean, though she never smelled. I guess she was just so high on amphetamine it never registered. She always looked immaculate and beautiful.

In the evening we’d help each other get dressed for the parties. I used to really get off making her very fabulous and beautiful. She’d go in my closet and get things to dress me. She’d go in her boxes and crates and dig out all these things. Scarves were very big then. And jewelry. I wore her trousers because we were about the same size in pants. After her hands were healed, she would comb my hair and I used to do her hair. She got me to grow my hair back blond. It was white then, because they had convinced me that I was going to be an underground-movie star. I was very stupid and affected all the time. My hair was snow white, along with my eyebrows, my eyelashes, my sideburns . . . everything was white. People would come up: “Oh, if I only had hair like that . . . I’d give my right arm for it.”

I’d say, “Well, it costs seven dollars a week . . . you can have it.”

They just didn’t believe it wasn’t real. No, I didn’t have a pierced ear then, but I had a front tooth missing due to drugs and bad diet and poverty. Ruined my whole mouth. These teeth are all artificial.

Sometimes we’d spend two days getting dressed and we’d sail right past the party we were going to. That’s a common amphetamine phenomenon. it’s not that everything’s slowed down. In fact, everything’s carried on at a rapid pace; but if s a problem of trying
every
combination, trying on every stitch with everything . . . until finally getting a complete outfit and being all ready to go and suddenly deciding that maybe you’ll just change the scarf, and then you do that and realize that something else doesn’t go with the scarf, so you change that something else, and you become completely disoriented. You spend all night getting dressed, and by then you completely forget where you’re supposed to be going. By the time you’re done, you’re so exhausted you lay down and go to sleep.

If you stayed up too long on amphetamines, your vision could play
tricks on you. Every car you passed with bucket seats had two people sitting in it. Every tree had someone behind it. You’d see people in the windows waving at you. You’d walk down the street and hear people calling your name. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby,” and I’d look all around and there’d be no one there. Then there were also voids. During a conversation you’d realize that you’d just blacked out for a moment—a whole gap in which you hadn’t heard anything.

There’s no remembrance of what you do under those barbiturate overdoses. You get up, move around, roam, and do things. Once I got up in the middle of the winter with no shoes on, nothing but a pair of slacks and a raccoon coat. And I walked for blocks for a pack of cigarettes, pounding on the front door of shops at five in the morning, insisting that they open up, and flagging a bus down by standing in front of it and making it stop: “Drive me to my street!” I remembered nothing. Tommy Slocum, the Indian boy who lived with us occasionally, followed me to make sure that nothing happened to me, and told me the next day what I’d gone and done; I just didn’t believe it.

When Edith first came to live with us, I had never given anybody any kind of needle in my life; I just didn’t know anything about it. When Edith said, “My dear, would you give me a poke?” I said, “Sure, tell me what it is.”

She took me into the bathroom when she had the needle all ready. I went, “Oh, no, no, no, no. I can’t do this.” She said, “Sure you can, it’s very easy.”

We went back and forth for twenty minutes before I was able to stick it in her behind. It was like stabbing somebody, to me. I was
so
frightened. I kept asking, “Does it hurt? Does it hurt?” She kept saying, “No, no, no, no, no.” She was holding on to the sink. She was all dressed; she had on navy blue corduroy pants and a Pucci halter top and a matching turban, and of course the pants were down so I could push the needle in her behind. I tried three times. I really almost fainted and fell off the toilet seat. I kept saying, “Don’t you want to swallow it or something?”

After a while I could give her an injection any time. In fact, I got pleasure out of giving people needles after a while. It was always made to sound very cute and “toy” to pull your pants down for the shot—“toy” meaning childlike. Very nursery school.

But getting poked really did hurt Edith because she began to develop a lot of scar tissue on her fanny and she had to use big, thick needles to get it in. There’s foreign matter with a lot of the street drugs, and it sort of sat in her fat tissue. These are all things I’ve learned since then.
My dear, beautiful Richie Berlin’s behind! They used to call it Rocky Mountain Range and everything. Rhoda Buddha’s Rocky Mountains—Rhoda Buddha was Richie’s nickname. She could give herself shots. But Edith refused to do it herself. She didn’t want to take that step down the hill.

When I first met them all, I wouldn’t have them touch me with a needle. I took a couple of pills once in a while; I would get high on those, and it was fabulous. They kept showing me this powder and saying it’s the same thing. Finally I let someone give me a poke; it put me in St. Vincent’s Hospital. I almost lost my leg. She had used a very long hypodermic, and because I have a very small behind, it went right through the muscle where it belonged. I was almost paralyzed for life. Gangrene and everything. In return for which they called me up at the hospital and told me to eat a lot of fresh fruit I That’s how serious it was to all of them . . . all these people working on
Ciao! Manhattan.
They thought it was just hilarious.

Then I got going on it. Getting pokes. I remember going into the Brasserie restaurant and having the little old bathroom attendant do it for me. I was so spaced out I couldn’t do it myself. I told him I was a diabetic. He said, “Oh, ah can’t do dat. Ah can’t do dat.” I said, “Look, I’ll just hold it here and you walk up behind me and hit it with your hand.” I had it in place for him. It was a machine like a small pistol, just the cutest thing. It’s like holding a water gun against your behind and squeezing the trigger. So anyway the bathroom attendant closed his eyes, and
pop
he went and hit it.

When Edith lived with me, she had a purse she carried around for the drugs—a picnic basket that was about two feet wide and a foot and a half deep which was filled with hundreds of little zipper bags, plastic bags, plastic boxes, bubblegum bubbles, a lot of it to hold syringes, cotton balls, little vials of alcohol, amphetamines, pills, tranquilizers. Everything was inside of something else. That’s an amphetamine dementia. Lots of order. You find something that fits in this box. Then you find something that this box fits in; everything goes inside something else, and if s all very mazy but tight and orderly. It’s known as being anal compulsive. It’s an amphetamine trait. Most people who take amphetamines are very neat: they’ll fluff up a pillow to make it look nice while you’re stI’ll sitting on it. They empty ashtrays. Edith could spend hours unloading her purse. And then start packing it up again and forget what she was looking for when she started. Incredible! Anywhere. On the sidewalk, on the street, in a restaurant, a bar. Hundreds of things would come out to be unscrewed and looked in and
then screwed back up and replaced.
So
many things. It was like carrying an entire life-style with you . . . like living with a camper van on your back. Oh, it was definitely an amphetamine thing. They all did it; they all had tote bags. I had a tote bag. I don’t mean to exclude myself from all of these things I’m talking about, because we were all the same.

She took the basket with her when we went out. We went out a lot. One night we went to see Jimi Hendrix give a special performance at Steve Paul’s The Scene. Edith had talked about it for days in advance. We went in Margoulef’s gold Cadillac, which we parked illegally on Eighth Avenue. We had no reservations, but she did a whole production demanding to see Steve Paul, letting them know just who she was, and we got a special ringside table in a corner, kind of private but public so you could be seen at the same time. Edith was very quiet through the whole thing. She spent most of the performance going through her wicker basket, opening plastic bubblegum capsules that she had buttons in, and loose hypodermic needles. While this was going on, Jim Morrison, the rock star, got up on the stage and went through an adoration number. He took down Hendrix’s pants and went down on him right up there on the stage. At first everyone’s mouths fell open. When it was over, they applauded and screamed. Edith thought it was absolutely fabulous, but disgusting. Did Hendrix mind? Oh, no, I guess not! Well, what man
would
mind? Those people were so very uninhibited anyway, they were all so stoned. I don’t think Hendrix had an orgasm. None of those people were able to reach an orgasm easily because of the quantity of drugs they were on at all times.