My Little Blue Dress (25 page)

July 16th—Friday

Genius is a strange thing. Those early years of the sixties when my friends and I were all running around Manhattan
making art and music and weird conceptual films it never
occurred
to us that we were doing anything that
mattered
. We were merely pleasing ourselves, following our blisses, and it came as an enormous shock to all of us when we suddenly, in 1962-ish, became massively successful. One day we were happy, penny-pinching bohemians and the next you literally couldn't open a magazine without seeing Andy (Warhol) or Bob (Dylan) or our English friends the Beatles alongside an article about how great we were, the irrevocable impact we were having on Western culture and what “geniuses” we all were. It was flattering, no question, but at the same time slightly mystifying. Did it really take a “genius” to do a giant, perfectly lifelike painting of a soup-can label? How about “synthesizing black music with white music”? Given that both musical forms did already exist, hadn't it always been
inevitable
that someone would think of combining them? Why did the media insist on giving the “genius” label simply to the first person to execute one of these basic, obvious ideas?

“Because that's the way the world has always worked,” I recall Bob Dylan hypothesizing at a party in 1963. It was me and him and Andy, and we were drinking in a corner. “They called Galileo a genius just for quote unquote ‘discovering' that the world is round, even though the plain, unvarnished fact of the matter is that the world
is
round. Same with Albert Einstein. Everyone just went nuts about him, and for what? That relativity thing? Did it really take a ‘genius' to figure out that there's
some
sort of relationship between energy, mass and the speed of light? That's all physics
is
. The genius of Albert Einstein was in recognizing that the first physicist to spend one whole afternoon with a big white piece of paper working out whether it was 2 =
m
+
c
 . . . or
the square root of
m
=
c
to the power of
e
—I mean, how many combinations are there? Ten?
Fifteen?
The first one to do that could spend the rest of his life sitting around signing autographs and getting his knob sucked every night by Marilyn Monroe or whatever.”

“You're right,” said Andy. “All those people did was just discover what was obvious.”

“Exactly,” I contributed. “Discover the world is
square
and maybe you've done something.”

“
Then
you're a genius,” Andy agreed, with an affirmative twitch of his famous white wig.

“I
suppose
what it is,” Bob went on, setting his beer on the floor so he could gesture more freely, “is that we're probably just more
intelligent
than ordinary people. We only see these “great discoveries” and “acts of genius” as simple and obvious because we ourselves
are
geniuses. If we were ordinary people then it would probably never occur to us to do a giant painting of a soup-can label. It would be . . . beyond our capacity. I mean obviously I'm not saying ordinary people are stupid . . .”

“Well, I am,” said Andy. “I'm sorry, but that's exactly what I'm saying.”

We drank in silence, considering his words.

July 17th—Saturday

Pretty tired all day, reader. I should take some vitamin pills or something. Except I don't have any. Is that an irony? No it isn't, is it? It's just a deficiency. A vitamin deficiency.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

July 18th—Sunday

So I'm having a funny feeling—and, reader, it's a feeling about
you
.

On more than one occasion today as I wafted in and out of reverie on the electric bed I could have sworn there was someone else in the apartment: specifically you, reader, sitting in the nasty armchair and
staring
at me. With a question on your lips. Namely:

“If you were really such great pals with Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, etc., then
how come I've never heard of you?
”

Which is a more than fair question.

So let me explain.

Late 1964. A Friday afternoon. I was dressed very nicely—in tight black turtleneck, short, plaid skirt—because
The New York Times Magazine
was coming to Andy's studio to take a group photo and interview us all for a large feature article on the New York Scene. We all took our places before the big white background, the photographer told us to smile . . .

And suddenly I panicked. I was about to become History. If I stood there and allowed myself to be photographed then I'd be frozen that way for all eternity, in one particular pose, as being one particular sort of person, as an icon of one particular time period, the early sixties. Throughout my life, I couldn't help feeling, my most valuable trait had always been my ability to adapt, to mutate, to entirely change who I was to fit new and challenging circumstances . . . and here I was about to give that all up?

I ducked out of the shot just as the photographer was about to shoot.

“I can't do this.”

“What?”

“You're not taking my photograph.”

“We . . . we have to. How else are we going to illustrate the interview?”

“There isn't going to be an interview.”

“But . . . but this is your big chance to be a famous artist.”

“I know.” I covered my eyes with my hand. “And that's why I'm going home.”

George Harrison tried to stop me but all he got for his trouble were a few strands of gray hair as I sprinted out of there in genuine tears and hurried back to my hotel.

That was a Friday. The following Monday, after a weekend of room service and introspection, I emerged into the world with a plan: rather than be a famous artist myself I was going to become a
manager
of famous artists, behind the scenes, a mistress of puppets pulling the strings of this exciting new culture without ever being seen myself.

It didn't take me long to put this plan into effect. I bought a newspaper, sat in a café, went through the classified ads with the proverbial red pencil and by the end of that week I had a suite of offices on the West Side, and a staff, comprising:

Wendy, a thin, highly competent secretary with a bored, sexy demeanor.

Russell, an unskilled red-headed teenager whose job it was to do all the box moving and package delivery.

And that's why you've never heard of me, despite my being friends with Andy Warhol.

Because instead of being a famous artist I stepped out of the limelight and became a
manager
.

And life was fine after that.

More
than fine.

Good.

July 19th—Monday

First day of a new week and Bruno Maddox seems to have laid the cornerstone of a rock opera titled
Cabin Pressure
. As far as I could tell—Bruno was holding the pad upside down—the hero of
Cabin Pressure
is an alcoholic airline pilot who flies a nightly route between two continents that, deliciously, are never named. There is a real family atmosphere on the plane. Its only passengers are a handful of regular commuters who are all on first-name terms with both the flight crew and the Captain. In fact it seems that most of them are in love with the Captain, but their love, unfortunately, cannot save him from:

1. himself. He spends a lot of time alone in the cockpit, downing those little miniature bottles of spirits, thinking about lost love, the past . . . and singing songs such as “One Night over the Azores.”
   

    
   

2. Sharifa Mustafa, a sexy female Islamic terrorist—and it is here that things get interesting.
   

Known to her friends as the Mother of the Suitcase Bomb, Sharifa Mustafa is riding the plane every evening to do reconnaissance for an eventual terrorist attack. Like all great hunters she has to understand her prey before she
moves in for the kill. But. As things develop, Sharifa finds herself coming to respect the people she is planning to kill and actually falling in love with the Captain. Sharifa's mixed emotions are one of
Cabin Pressure
's principal subplots.

Another subplot is the tension between Sharifa, a natural brunette—she's Islamic—and Debbie, the blond flight attendant, because it quickly becomes apparent that Debbie, like Sharifa,
seriously
has the hots for Captain Mazzocks.

Yes, that's right. “Mazzocks.” Which sounds a little like “Maddox.” The echo is intentional. You can think of it as an “additional layer” to the whole thing. As the audience sits there in their seats, watching the characters intertwine in their inexorable dance of death, they will be conscious all the while that Bruno Maddox, the composer-librettist of
Cabin Pressure
, has chosen to have a main character with a name that sounds like his own. It'll be . . . stimulating for them in a . . . weirdsortof. . .

Oh, look. You get the picture.

Fuck
I'm tired.

July 20th—Tuesday

[Day off from writing. Old woman's privilege.]

July 21st—Wednesday

Sorry about yesterday, reader, but I've been having more trouble with my health. Neck all of a sudden has gotten very painful and stiff—and so has each of my ten fingers.
I'm actually in an awful lot of pain. If I think about all the different sensations at once . . . well, it makes me slightly want to
die
.

July 22nd—Thursday

Oh, and my head is just a big bag of dizziness.

July 23rd—Friday

But enough about me. Bruno Maddox is writing a novel is the big news. His novel, as yet untitled, is the story of a man who has a video camera implanted in the back of his head. The man is on the run from some policemen who have falsely accused him of murdering his own girlfriend. By day the man roams the glass-and-steel walkways of an antiseptic city in the not-so-distant future, embroiling himself in a seamy lawless underworld as he fights to clear his name, and by night he retreats to an abandoned warehouse down by the docks where he listens to opera, drinks high-protein milk-shakes, and after attaching a special cable to his head, reclines in a huge steel armchair before a pyramid of old abandoned television sets and reviews a day's worth of footage from the camera in the back of his head.

That would be enough, don't you think, reader? That would be enough for a truly good piece of fiction.

But there's more. A lot more.

For instance, when Bruno actually writes the novel he's going to narrate the material captured by the camera . . .
using a different typeface
. I'm serious. For instance, at some point Buck Moolox notices . . .

. . . his supposedly dead girlfriend, approaching from the rear, pale and thin and hunted-looking. She reaches out to tap his shoulder but just then she sees something coming for her from the side. Her eyes widen in horror and she finds it necessary to sprint away.
*

And also there are
footnotes
, reader. Footnotes written by a kindly, futuristic policeman who has come across Buck Moolox's diary and his collection of tapes even
further
in the not-so-distant future, after Buck Moolox is dead. The policeman contributes a preface to the novel, plus the footnotes,
plus
an index, and then at the very end of the book there's a note by the policeman's wife informing us that the policeman
himself
has in fact been killed. The policeman, we learn, has been killed
by himself
because the story of Buck Moolox was so “goddam fucking sad.”

The wife note has its own typeface, too, by the way.

Oh God.

July 24th—Saturday

I fucking hate being alive, incidentally—did I tell you this earlier? My entire body itches and the tip of one of my
fingers has started to bleed. You think I'm joking. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I'm not, in fact, joking.

July 25th—Sunday

One of the things I sometimes like to do as a writer is use Sundays to address lingering, possibly festering, questions in the mind of the reader. For instance, this one:

“So
what
if you became a fucking manager back in the sixties? Why does that mean we haven't heard of you? We've heard of all the
other
big name managers. There was that gay guy who managed the Beatles, and that other gay guy who managed the Stones, and that incredibly fat and violent guy who managed Led Zeppelin and that nondescript guy who had that club in San Francisco . . . ? I mean who do you think you're trying to
fool
, you stinking and imbecilic old crone? What kind of game . . .”

Let me cut you off there, reader, and quickly point out to you that one overcast Monday morning in 1965 I marched forcefully into our main conference room committed to resolving the problem of my own non-celebrity once and for all. My brain felt like it was seeping blood into the upholstery of my head, but the fact remained: I was one tough fucking daughter of a bitch and I was seconds away from taking care of business, once and for all.