Back in real time. Getting ready for another European jaunt.
Oren gets on a plane later tonight, I split in a few days...
So, I was in the City earlier, helping Oren with a couple errands. After I dropped him off, I was kind of cruising around downtown looking for an appropriate place to micturate. All the while marveling at the new buildings, and all the fancy shops that weren't there before. I don't really recognize much, but I'm on the Bowery, and I know CBGB's used to be across the street and there's a parking space in front of The Bowery Poetry Club, know that, so I go in. Minutes later, on my way out, I hear a vaguely familiar voice/whine coming from the space, I peek behind the curtain, and dammit if it isn't Taylor Mead. Yes, the one and only Warhol superstar. I give my donation and stand by the bar as the surreal scene continues to unfold before my eyes. There were maybe fifteen shiftless people in the room. A few of them were typing aggressively into their phones. Chairs were clattering. No one was really listening, save one man in the front row. Then someone asked me if I was there for the bingo. Huh? Then I started to get it, as the room filled up slowly throughout Mead's tenure on stage. These were kids coming for bingo, not poetry.
God Bless New York, they got more than they bargained for. Mead had a little portable radio with him, he would hold the mic up to the box, WQXR was his accompaniment. And he shuffled papers, held up simple hand drawn illustrations. A Fairy Tale, by Taylor Mead. It was positively brilliant. "I want to lick his asshole", he says, then adds, "is that too much for you people?" The staff and i answer back no!,
as the kids in the room look up half bored. The room is filling with the bingo kids, and Mead is told he has five or ten more minutes. He snorts and sputters into the microphone, then off handedly adds how he and Elizabeth Taylor shared the same lover, she in Beverly Hills, he in Central Park- Montgomery Clift. But they probably weren't lovers long, he said, Clift had a very small penis...
The waitress helped him down from the stage, and leaning on his cane, he made his way to the back of the room. I greeted him at the back of the bar, and though I know he didn't remember me (I used to see him all the time at the Grand Union when I lived across from the Bleecker Street Cinema; his cart loaded with nine lives cat food, and we'd say hello to each other), we chatted for a few minutes. I leave feeling positively revived and filled with an absurd sense of hope. The man is 86. Guess if Monty had lived he's be just a couple years older...
