I was 23 years old, gloomy and depressed and freezing cold in London that year. And then a job offer came: pick up a Mini at the port of Harwich. Easy money. But I can’t drive. I’d been in so many car wrecks that by the age of 18 I refused to learn, staying in the passenger seat clutching my St. Christopher medallion. The vehicle in question was a racing Mini, not street legal. Just put it on the pre-arranged tow truck and bring the muffler, which got knocked off when they were unloading the car. I retrieved the muffler, sawed it in half back at the flat in Tufnell Park, six pounds of fine Kenyan herb, innit? Dropped off the next day for a wad of cash, first purchase a one-way ticket to NYC.
Max newly arrived in New York, 1973
In October 1973 I landed at JFK with only one contact, a couple who had stayed at our spacious Tufnell Park flat briefly that summer. There was no doorbell at 118 Spring Street, so I yelled up at the window. Ignacio looked surprised to see me but threw down the keys in a sock. Ignacio and his wife Caroline, both bollock naked, welcomed me into their Soho loft. Their only eccentricity was the indoor nudity, though I wasn’t required to disrobe myself.
I was well ready for my turn in the New York barrel; the bars stayed open until 4am, no need to down three pints of lager at five to 11 and search frantically for temporary companionship. Here you had half the night to linger and scheme, blabber and smoke, as the ley lines of recent art and lit history throbbed beneath my feet, even if much of it was hearsay. Jack Kerouac wrote a draft of On the Road on West 22nd Street, Jackson Pollock tore the door off the toilet at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, Robert Frank and June Leaf lived and worked at 7 Bleecker Street. All these locations and more were filed in my overstuffed head, and the bonus magic of this city was that apart from floating through such a dense concentration of recent history, you might encounter any of these legendary folk at any time, in the flesh.
Ignacio added me to his crew of ruffians who were renovating a building on West 53rd Street, steps away from the Museum of Modern Art, where the late, great poet Frank O’Hara had worked and written Lunch Poems, my guidebook and bible, along with holy tome On the Road. After a couple of months working with Ignacio’s crew, Kerouac’s roadtripping obliged me to follow his path along Route 66 in order to authenticate my own Lonesome Traveller cred. I jumpstarted the trip by taking a Greyhound to Hugo, Colorado, and stuck out my thumb on Route 66. Westward ho. The romance of the road quickly faded. In Gallup, New Mexico, a Vietnam vet tried to steal my Frye boots and, finally, a one-eyed Texan drove me all the way to Los Angeles, which seemed to be filled with Jesus freaks and scary Mansonoids. I went directly to the Greyhound station and rode to San Francisco pronto. After three dull months I was missing New York as if it was already my home. I spotted an ad for a rideshare to NYC on a bulletin board at UC Berkeley. A few days later I was in the passenger seat of a big Ford Galaxie 500 heading east with a very attractive Black woman at the wheel, an actress off to join the cast of a new musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. After our potentially perilous five-day trip as a mixed-race couple passing through deep red states, we moved in together to a dilapidated loft she had rented sight unseen on 10th between Avenues C and D.
Max in 1974
It was high summer and a garbage strike was adding its fragrance to the overheated streets. According to the Daily News, President Ford told New York to “drop dead” and cut federal funds. The infrastructure was falling apart, street crime rampant, blah blah blah. Despite these problems, New York’s relentless electric charge of energy – creative, sexual, philosophical – pulsated like a rich red heart on everybody’s sleeve, epitomised by Wayne (later Jayne) County’s classic lyric, “If you don’t wanna fuck me, baby, fuck OFF!” Sexy Seventies indeed, with all the girls in their ’40s porch dresses, halter tops, hot pants and platform heels highstepping down Second Avenue, or driving beat-up pickup trucks in skintight 501s, scarlet lipstick and Tony Lama boots. What could a poor boy do when confronted by such fresh cookies but overdo the Brit accent, which worked at least 50 per cent of the time, even on the embryonic feminists just now rising up. My London sidekick Jim P, known as ‘The Duke of Durophet’, had dragged me to Warhol movies at the New Arts Lab in Euston, where repeated viewings of Chelsea Girls helped to create a roadmap to the various stars of downtown – Gerard Malanga exiting a taxi with Brigid Polk on 14th Street; Eric Emerson, whose blond beauty shone as brightly as that atomic Teutonic blonde chanteuse Nico in many of the movie’s random, plotless scenes.
I got hired at a bar called the Saint Adrian Company Bar & Grill, a posh name for a very low dive, low-rent version of Max’s Kansas City. Eric was fronting an early glam rock band called the Magic Tramps, who had a regular gig at my bar, and at the Mercer Arts Center, which had originally been part of Broadway Central, the hotel in which Saint Adrian’s was located. Emerson had actually renovated the stage in the former ballroom. It was where I first saw Suicide, a two-man band comprising Alan Vega on vocals and Martin Rev on keyboards, who performed raw, metal-flavoured versions of 96 Tears, Dream Baby Dream and other musically toxic concoctions. Both Alan and Eric were regulars at Saint Adrian’s, along with a cast of freaks and weirdos for whom I instantly felt a strange familial love. The wise and wiseass bartenders were like older brothers from another mother. They took me under their wing and steered me away from heroin while doing copious amounts of every drug themselves, not least cocaine, which at that time seemed to be of a dazzling purity. Everything in and about the city was a constant booming and zooming, so embraceable after the gloomy indifference of the London from which I had absconded.
Max and Alan Vega from Suicide in 1975
My actress girlfriend was now appearing nightly with Jesus Christ on Broadway and I spent time visiting my upstairs neighbour Steve Shevlin’s loft and its constant stream of interesting visitors. Steve and his wife Maria were the soul of New York kindness. Steve was learning to play bass and would soon help to form a band called the Senders. He had briefly been a boxer and still had the silk dressing gown with his name embroidered on the back. (Years later, going to visit my lover, Clarissa, on Thompson Street, I was shocked when she greeted me wearing Steve’s dressing gown. Steve and Maria were long since divorced and I had introduced him to C at a Senders gig a few weeks before, never dreaming he would so rapidly replace me.) David Johansen and Syl Sylvain were often at Steve’s loft and the first time I met the guy with the big hair, Johnny Thunders, who was too busy straightening out his works with a pair of pliers to say hello. Steve had gone to high school in Queens with Johnny and had already regaled me with some amazing stories about their teen years. Johnny often guest-starred with the Senders and after I got to know him a little better, he asked me to write some song lyrics. I churned out a few amphetamine-inspired ditties: Ditched for a Diesel, 80% of Mom & Dad. Sample lyric: “I’m bad, I’m bad, I know I’m bad / But it’s 80% of mom and dad,” a doggerel variant on Philip Larkin’s classic poem about parents. I gave them to Johnny, hoping to clean up on royalties when he hit the big time, because he always had that charisma of a real star. But a few years later, Johnny was dead in New Orleans from tainted smack, and the only trace I ever found of my lyrical contributions was the three-letter title of his song M.I.A.
On New Year’s Eve, the New York Dolls headlined at Mercer Arts. By midnight I was legless, tripping out and tipping over on my cheap platform heels. I tumbled down the central staircase and came to rest on the granite floor, both heels torn from my shoddy 8th Street shoes. Unharmed because the alcohol content in my body had reduced my flesh and bones to an unbreakable rubbery consistency. (True fact, ask any seasoned alcoholic.) Steve’s wife, the divine Maria, got me into a cab and took me home to East 10th Street safe and unsound as I was. I tossed the platforms and went back to my trusty Fryes. The hotel that housed Saint Adrian’s was falling apart like the rest of the city. It had once hosted the likes of Diamond Jim Brady but was now a welfare hotel filled with the homeless, prostitutes roaming the halls, junkies clogging the plumbing with their works. When the leaks in the ceiling above the bar began turning into Niagara Falls the owner decided to abandon ship. Two months later, while Eric Emerson’s band was rehearsing, the entire hotel tumbled into the street, taking the Mercer Arts Center down with it. The Magic Tramps managed to flee before the roof collapsed on the ballroom. Eric, however, could not avoid his fate. He OD’d a year later on Hudson Street.
My actress went on tour and never came back. I got mugged and moved out of East 10th Street three blocks west, a more peaceable kingdom. The entire top floor of #114 Saint Mark’s Place, between 1st and A, $200 a month. It was also closer to my next job, waiting tables at Phebe’s on the Bowery (still a going concern), where Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and all that mad crew from the Ridiculous Theatrical Company would come after the plays they put on at La MaMa just down East 4th Street. Jackie was still cruising on the decidedly mixed reviews of her latest two-hour amphetamine epic, Vain Victory. Nobody wanted to wait on them because they never tipped, overplaying the ‘starving artists’ card. I got to know Jackie better at Slugger Ann’s, her grandma’s beer joint on Second Avenue, where Jackie sometimes tended bar. (Nan Goldin took a highly unflattering portrait of me and the artist Juan Sanchez Juarez drinking at this bar, which appears in one of her early books, with David Armstrong, The Other Side.) Here endeth this stroll down Memory Lane. I quote myself out loud – “Count one, count two, three, four and five / How come, lucky fucker, that you’re still alive?”
Photography courtesy of Honey Wolters and Chris Mcneur. Taken from 10 Men Issue 60 – ECCENTRIC, FANTASY, ROMANCE – out now. Order your copy here.
