I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (13 page)

At the intermission of
The Lion King,
we had hurried to the bathroom and I had told him to meet me in the downstairs lobby when we each finished. But the place was so crowded I couldn’t find him at first. I finally spotted him cowering over in a corner, his little face a fist of tears. I folded him in my arms and swept him back up the stairs toward our seats. “I will never abandon you,” I promised as we made our way through the crowd.

It was then I realized it. I had searched my whole life to hear those exact five words ever since I was a child myself who had lost his parents. I had no idea that when I found them—when I finally heard them—I would be saying them to someone else.

*   *   *

During that first year I mentored Brandon, The Family Center arranged a camping trip for the boys and girls in its program and those of us who mentored them. We piled into busses and rode the couple of hours up into the Catskills to a site that contained a lodge and several rustic cabins.

The first day, it rained rather heavily and we ended up having to ad-lib games and other activities at the lodge. Toward the end of the long afternoon, Brandon and I were sitting next to a woman who was teaching her young charge how to paint her toenails and fingernails with the red polish she had pulled from her purse, the welcome heady fumes from the little opened bottle of polish cutting sharply through the lodge’s musty smell. The slight dizziness I was feeling from the polish’s fumes helped to wake me up from the afternoon’s rainy stupor.

I found some paper and crayons and Brandon and I lay on the floor next to them as close as I could arrange for us to get without drawing attention to our proximity so I could continue to breathe in the nail polish. The paper and crayons—we’d have to draw something, I presumed—was just a ruse at that point, even for Brandon, it seemed, who pretended not to be looking at the reddening toenails of the little girl who was around his age.

“Do you know what a landscape is?” I heard myself ask him as I began to draw a couple of mountains on the piece of paper I had found.

He shrugged.

“It’s a pretty picture of a mountain scene. I’m drawing a mountain scene—like right there outside the window,” I said, pointing through the lodge’s large picture window toward the two small mountain-like hills in the distance.

Brandon—as well as the little girl next to him—watched me continue to draw a facsimile of the two large hills out beyond the lodge. I took a blue crayon and formed, like an azure snake, the overflowing stream running through the bit of valley between them.

“May I borrow the nail polish?” I asked my fellow mentor, who looked thankful to be relieved of her toenail-painting duty. “We can use this red polish to paint some flowers. See?” I told the little girl, who was now fascinated by what was going on next to her. I asked if she wanted to paint a few flowers herself and, as I held the tiny bottle for her, she dipped the tinier brush into it, then began to dot the paper with a whole garden of red. I gave Brandon a crayon. “Want to draw some birds in the sky?” I asked him. “A sky is not a sky until there are birds in it.”

“I don’t know how to draw no birds,” he said, shrugging yet again.

“Do you know how to make an
M
?” I asked him.

“Yeah, Kev. I ain’t that stupid,” he said.

“You’re not stupid at all,” I told him. “Just pretend you’re making an
M,
but flatten it out and it will look like a bird flying in the sky.” I took another crayon from the box and showed him how to do it. The mentor next to me had fished into her purse to find her phone and was busy perhaps typing
M
s herself within the words she was texting to some unknown person. She giggled at the texted response back to her when her cell phone buzzed. The little girl, oblivious to her own mentor now, continued to dot the page with red flowers, her little wet fingernails imprinting their own bud-like images into the garden she was creating. Brandon edged closer to her and drew flattened
M
s in the sky.

“What starts with an
M
?” I asked them.

“‘Motorola,’” said the girl’s mentor, snapping her cell phone shut and watching this most elemental of landscapes taking shape before us all.

“‘Mama’?” asked the girl.

“That’s right. ‘Mama’ starts with an
M,
” I told her.

“‘Mentor,’” said Brandon, filling the landscape’s sky now with a flock of the flattened letters. “Your turn,” he said. “What’chu think starts with a
M,
Kev?”

I looked away from the crayoned landscape and past my own reflection there in the picture window toward the landscape outside, the two small mountains blending with my face. “‘Miss’ssippi,’” I said, remembering Henry, my own long-ago mentor, as well the heartbreaking landscape of that state where both my parents had been buried. “‘Moss,’” I said, remembering Howard. “‘Madonna.’ ‘Mount Kilimanjaro,’” I continued, the words spilling quietly from me. “‘Me,’” I said, looking at myself reflected in the glass of the window, the only landscape lingering now in my line of vision. I turned back toward Brandon and the girl and her mentor and the room, rowdy with so many other boys and girls, so many other mentors, the mugginess mixing with the fumes from the nail polish still in my nostrils making it difficult to breathe. “‘Methodist’ starts with an
M,
” I said, remembering when I was a boy and that first day I had attended such a church with my mother. “‘Methodist,’” I said again, but heard only the word’s first worrisome syllable.

“Look, Kev!” Brandon exclaimed. “Look!” The girl’s mentor took the tiny nail polish brush from her, put it back into the bottle, and screwed back on its top.

Brandon touched my arm. “Kev, look!” he said again. He held up his drawing for me to see. “A landscape! It’s a landscape! I made a landscape!”

I had made one too. And for the first time I was beginning to see it.

“Look!” Brandon kept at me. “Look! Look!”

I looked.

SIX

The Factory Worker

From
The Andy Warhol Diaries

Entry dated Friday, October 31, 1986

Benjamin was supposed to pick me up but he never showed. I walked around. This was the day of the surprise birthday party Steven Greenberg was giving for Paige at Nell’s. For days I’d just been shuffling papers for Paige’s party trying to help Tama do a good guest list, and I couldn’t get it together, and then Gael took over and did it all really fast. Worked all afternoon. I went home and then Paige picked me up, and as far as she knew we were just going to a blind date dinner at Nell’s.

So we get to Nell’s and Paige still doesn’t suspect anything and then right at the last second, right outside the door Glenn O’Brien’s wife Barbara was getting out of a cab and said, “Hi, Paige, we’re here for your surprise party.” We couldn’t believe it, but Paige was distracted enough so it didn’t really sink in and I think she actually was really shocked when she walked into the club and everybody shouted, “Surprise!”

Gael did a really good job of pulling it all together. And the party was so nice. I sat right where I did on the opening night—right by the front door—and I didn’t move once. The party took over the whole street level floor, and then they let the public in at 10:00 but they sent them downstairs. And it’s the new look in restaurants—going for the sort of phony rich look. Dark with stuffed furniture.

And let’s see, Thomas Ammann was there and Tama and Nick Love from LA who’s staying at Fred’s. And Larissa was there. And Jay, and Wilfredo, and Gia, and Peter Koper. And the new kid who works for
Interview
who was at Paramount, Kevin Sessums.

*   *   *

After I gave up my dream of being an actor I got a job for five years at Paramount Pictures in the 1980s working as a highfalutin factotum in the marketing department for an executive vice president named Buffy Shutt. When that department was being moved out to Los Angeles I had to find another job. I had been writing short stories and plays during that time—Buffy was nice enough to pretend not to notice I was writing them at my desk outside her office—and since I had always been a lover of magazines I decided to try to find a job that could combine my writing with a job in some form of journalism. A friend of mine was giving up his position at Warhol’s
Interview
magazine as the senior editor there so he could spend time at a Buddhist spiritual retreat in the Himalayan mountains and called to ask if I might be interested in taking over his job. I had no experience in the magazine business, but my past as an actor, my time in the movie business for those five years even as a factotum, and my ambitions to write for a living all combined to make me a good candidate for such a position. I should have questioned why I wanted to replace someone in a job that had sent him fleeing to a spiritual retreat in the Himalayas, one that would ultimately send me seeking my own form of spirituality years later. But questions back then were what I put to others, not to myself.

After I had several meetings with
Interview
’s editor, Gael Love, she offered me the position on a probationary basis because of my lack of experience. I did give her a few of my short stories to read, which I realize now must have seemed unnervingly innocent to her—yet, conversely, rather nervy of me as well—and I think those are the two reasons she gave me the six-week tryout. I don’t think she ever even looked at the short stories after she’d laughed in my face when I handed them to her, which I came to realize wasn’t rudeness on her part but a kind of cackle that erupted from her as a defense mechanism when she was caught off guard.

The stress of not being caught off guard myself in those early days at
Interview
was causing my first bouts of insomnia and making me sick with exhaustion. I’d walk back to the bathroom by Andy’s little downstairs office at the old Con Ed plant in the West 30s that served as the Factory back then and close the door for a a pee-and-panic attack as I came to think of those frequent trips. One day I was in there for quite a while just staring at myself in the mirror. I looked awful. It was the first time I could remember ever having dark circles under my eyes. Nothing was worth making myself look that sick. “You’re just a Factory worker,” I whispered to the person in the mirror.

When I headed back to my office I saw that Andy was in his little downstairs lair. “Are you all right?” he asked me. It was the first time he had even acknowledged my presence in the office. I was sure he remembered me as the overaged urchin with whom Henry Geldzahler had gallivanted about town in the past when our paths had crossed, so I was perplexed by how he seemed to be ignoring me. Yet maybe that was reason enough for him to snub me at first, his perception of me as a gallivanter. There was a reason Andy referred to his studio and its offshoots as the Factory. He had a real blue-collar work ethic and expected those around him to have it too. But his wariness had only added to my stress. “I’ve noticed you go to that bathroom a lot,” he said.

What was he intimating? That I was a drug addict? Did he have fantasies about my snorting coke off his toilet seat? “I’m not doing coke if that’s what you mean,” I came right out and challenged him. I couldn’t tell if he looked shocked by what I had said or hurt that I had assumed he had been accusing me of taking drugs. But his usual enigmatic expression did flutter toward some sort of emotion. “Honestly, Andy, I’ve been stressing out about this new job. I just want to be good at it.”

The confession—the friendly intimacy of it—seemed to shock him even more than challenging him about the cocaine. His face continued to flutter but could not find the emotion on which it wished to land. “Don’t let Gael get to you. She can be a bit much. But she’s so good at getting ads in the magazine,” he said, summing up what he considered her editorial talent. “I have my other sources. They say you’re doing a great job. Relax. I told Gael and Fred to go ahead and give you the job,” he said, mentioning Fred Hughes, who served as the magazine’s publisher as well as the business brains of Andy’s art empire. “I didn’t realize you were on probation,” said Andy. “Welcome to the Factory.”

Later that day Andy even stopped by my office to give me a welcome-to-the-Factory present. It was a photograph he had taken in Central Park of an olive-skinned, oily-haired boy opening his jacket to reveal a T-shirt with James Dean’s face on it. On the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph Andy—or someone who worked for him—had embossed his name. I was touched by the gesture and told him I’d hang it on the wall of my office next to the poem I was at that moment cutting out of a book to frame and put above my typewriter in those precomputer days.

“What poem is that?” he asked, coming to stand over me and place the photo on my desk.

“It’s by John Keats,” I told him. “It’s called ‘On Fame.’ I thought it was kind of appropriate for this place.”

“Oh, wow. We’ve never had anybody around here who reads John Keats,” he said. “Would you read it to me?”

Andy Warhol stood by my desk and stared blankly off into space. He waited. I felt I had no choice but to do what he requested. I began to read:

“Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy

To those who woo her with too slavish knees,

But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,

And dotes the more upon a heart at ease.…”

I read the rest of the poem and waited for Andy’s reply as I stared down at the photograph he’d taken of the silk-screened face of James Dean on some banjee boy’s dingy T-shirt. I touched the raised letters of his embossed name, lingering over that final
l
in “Warhol.” “Wow,” he finally said. “I haven’t thought of myself as a thoughtless boy in a long time.”

He turned to go but stopped in my doorway. His back was to me. He adjusted his wig. “Keats is buried in the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome,” he said.

*   *   *

Andy Warhol and I had actually met several times before through Henry, who had championed his career at its beginning in the 1960s. Henry had even insisted to me that he was the one who introduced Andy to Fred Hughes and thus set in motion the making of his art empire.