Remain in Love Page 5

  Like any other school, RISD had its cliques and Karen Achenbach and her clique were hanging out that night at the refectory. I walked up to her and said hello. Her roommate, Kenny Goodman, was with her. Kenny always wore shades, was skinny and chic in tight-fitting black clothes, and gave me the impression he wished he were someplace else. He was a man of few words—at least with me—had a dark mystique, and seemed capable of dirty deeds. Donald Munroe was another member of this clique. Don had long, straight, blond hair and was as friendly and light as Kenny was serious and dark. He had a way of acting that some people would call swish. In his denim jacket and tight flared jeans, he was very good-looking. Don had a wonderfully acerbic sense of humor and would snap his fingers to punctuate his killing jokes. David Frasier was another member of this gang. He was very tall and thin with a huge head of Pre-Raphaelite curls, like a huge blond Afro. He was super calm, observing all around him. Finally, there was Andrea Kovacs, a brilliantly articulate young artist from Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Andrea dressed in beatnik-black from head to toe with jet-black hair, heavy black mascara, and eyeliner. She was capable of very cutting remarks and fired barbs off as fast as she pleased. She could also be completely adorable if she liked you. I was relieved that she seemed to like me.

  I soon realized that this clique was probably emulating Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd. Just the year before, Warhol had come up to the RISD Museum with his entourage for a show he called Raid the Icebox, where he went through the museum’s basement storage and selected his favorite pieces to put on exhibit upstairs. Andy’s presence caused a lot of excitement at the school, which he enjoyed up to a point. He drew the line when an anti–Vietnam War activist began shouting and protesting. Andy just got up and walked straight out of the museum to the chartered tour bus that would convey him and his entourage back to the Factory in New York City.

  During dinner that night, I saw Andi—the girl I’d spotted my first day at RISD—across the room. She was sitting with some friends talking excitedly and laughing a lot. I took the plunge, walked over, and said, “This looks like a fun table. Mind if I join you?” Andi looked and me and asked, “What’s your name?” I told her and she said, “Mine’s Andi. Actually, it’s Andrea but everyone calls me Andi. Andi Shapiro.” Andi and I became very close very quickly. We were both interested in drawing and painting. I suspected she was very good and I soon found out she was. Andi was very petite and beautifully proportioned. With long, dark, naturally wavy hair and bright blue eyes, she was absolutely beautiful. She had a smattering of freckles across her cheeks and long dark eyelashes. Her personal style was somewhere between Katharine Hepburn’s and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. She had a keen wit, and still does, but was also capable of great seriousness. Once, while I was in a moment of reverie, she said to me, “Oh, Chris! You’re not happy. You’re just stoned!” She was sometimes critical of me. Andi was a very smart and cultured person. She was from Chappaqua, New York, and invited me to visit her family there. Her parents took us into the city to see Anthony Hopkins in Equus on Broadway, still my favorite Broadway play.

  My roommate, Hugh Roberts, finally showed up with a great excuse for his lateness: He had broken his leg and wore a plaster cast from his knee down to his toes. He said his friends called him Huey. He was well over six feet tall with a shag haircut. I helped him with his luggage and stuff. It turned out that we had some similarities in our background. We were WASPs and we’d both attended prep school for boys. Both of our fathers were lawyers. We liked to make art and get high, and we were hoping to break the mold we felt we had been expected to fill. We loved James Brown yet we also dug the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Terry Riley, and Moondog. I could tell we were going to get along just fine.

  Later that night, in our room after a joint and a few glasses of red Almaden wine, Huey told me about a terrible thing that had recently happened to him. His mother had committed suicide. She’d been missing for some time when investigators found bits of charred bone and the steel shanks of her high heels in the old basement incinerator. They said she had opened the little door and crawled into the flames fully clothed. Foul play was not suspected. Had she left a note? I didn’t ask. I remember feeling how strange and heavy this must be for any young guy and I felt bad about this, but Huey seemed emotionally strong and resilient.

  When classes began, I was relieved to find out that I was not completely out of my league. I had imagined that all the best artists from all the best schools had come to RISD and wondered if I could possibly compete. It turned out that many of my classmates had the same fears, but most of us did just fine.

  I especially enjoyed my life-drawing class, taught by George Pappas. We drew from nude models. Drawing a nude person can be a little awkward at first, but you get used to it. You have to learn how to really look deeply at the model, and to see how the shapes are connected and how the body flows, even at rest. Mr. Pappas pointed to different parts of the model’s body to stress the importance of understanding the skeletal system underneath. We had a number of models of all ages and sizes, but there was one young woman who was ravishingly beautiful. She was a tall, full-figured brunette with the look of an exotic dancer. She was escorted to the class each morning by a tall, dark, muscular guy with hair down to his waist. He must have been her boyfriend. She would undress behind a curtain and then walk to the center of the class in a silk kimono. We students were ready, perched on our drawing benches with large pads of newsprint paper, pencils, charcoal sticks, and Conté crayons. She stood on a platform—a sort of mini stage—and then she would drop the kimono to the floor to reveal her amazing physique. She had the figure and facial features of the young Sophia Loren. Mr. Pappas asked her to turn around and said, “Look at her back. The scapula are like little wings. See how delicate and beautiful the bones of her back are.” He was right; we were learning to train our eyes to really observe the human figure. You learned to see what muscles and bones were doing under the skin to hold the body together. I don’t think I was the only student in the room who became sexually aroused while drawing this particular model. She was powerfully sexy. If she wanted to, she would look you right in the eye and hold that gaze until you broke it. She never said a word to anyone. I believe she only modeled for Mr. Pappas’s class. I never saw her in any other classes. At the end of the class, her boyfriend would arrive to walk her home.

  RISD did not have any fraternities or sororities or sports teams, thank God, but we did have some great parties and dances. For the first dance of that year, the band was Flo and Eddie of the Turtles with members of Frank Zappa’s band, including the great Aynsley Dunbar on drums. Soon he would be working with David Bowie and Lou Reed, but not yet. Flo and Eddie were great singers and highly entertaining. Andi and I danced together that night for the first time. We had a ball and spent much of the evening dancing alongside Donald Munroe and Andrea Kovacs. I had become friends with them and looked up to them as artists and personalities. To me, they were among the stars of the school.

  The following weekend there was an even wilder dance. This time the band was made up of some hilarious habitués of RISD itself. Some had already graduated and some were still in school. Their band was called the Fabulous Motels. Charlie Rocket was the front man. Tall, slim, good-looking, and dressed in a silly superhero costume, he sang and rocked a boss electric accordion complete with distortion and feedback. On vocals and clarinet was a husky guy in a pink tutu and ballet shoes called Rudy Cheeks. They had a really great singing drummer named Sport Fisher. A painter named Dan Gosch, also dressed in a superhero costume, played a nutty gnome on a toy drum kit and xylophone. The guitarist was a guy called John Scherff and the bass player called himself Domino Floater. The scantily clad background singers and dancers were called the Tampoons and they were Barbara Conway, Bonita Flanders, and tiny, petite Mary Clarke. The Fabulous Motels were not just a great parody of rock and roll, they were a parody of show business itself. They had very funny and cool original songs, but
also rewrote hit songs of the day. For example, “Sweet Soul Music” became “Men” with lyrics like, “Do you like big men, y’all? Big strong men, y’all? Spotlight on John Wayne, now. Spotlight on Ernest Borgnine!” They made playful references to kinky sex in a song called “I Wanna Be on Top This Time (and Use My Riding Crop This Time.)” We loved the Motels and always looked forward to their RISD shows. Not only were they loads of fun, they were a good example of how music and art went hand in hand. They were Dada itself.

  On the weekends, Andi and I visited the RISD farm outside of town on Narragansett Bay to draw outdoors on the beach. Then we would hitchhike to Newport to eat oysters and clams and drink Narragansett beer at the Black Pearl on the harbor. We didn’t have a lot of spending money, but this new life was utterly romantic and the feeling of independence was fantastic.

  Huey and I did some wild things together. We would set our alarm clocks for 5:00 A.M., wake up and take some acid, then go back to sleep. Then we would wake up tripping and go to classes. A big part of the trip was to be able to maintain your composure so that no one was the wiser. This was a real challenge. Looking back, I don’t know how I did it. I don’t believe LSD ever improved my artwork, but it certainly loosened me up so that I was ever more mindful of the beauty of my surroundings and the people in my life.

  7

  MARTINA

  Let me tell you about the first time I saw Tina Weymouth. It was at the very beginning of the school year in September of ’71. I was relaxing on the grass of the “RISD Beach” at the corner of Benefit and Angell Streets. The “RISD Beach” was a little grassy park featuring a large bronze abstract sculpture called Daybreak by artist Gil Franklin. This was a place where the art students hung out between classes to chat, gossip, exchange ideas, or maybe just catch some rays. It was late afternoon, sunny and warm, a perfect New England day. I was sitting with Charlie the Model. Everyone at RISD knew Charlie. He was an artist’s model for life-drawing and figure-painting classes. He was a big guy—well over six feet tall—barrel chested, physically fit, with a kind and sweet disposition. When he saw you coming he would say, “Hi, friend!” Some people said he had been shell-shocked. I don’t know. There was something different about Charlie, but then a lot of people in the RISD community were different. So, Charlie and I were sitting on the grass exchanging pleasantries and watching people go by. I was feeling mellow, but still noticing things.

  Suddenly, as in a scene from a Truffaut movie, I saw a girl pedaling down Benefit Street in our direction on an old yellow three-speed bicycle. She wore a blue-and-white-striped French sailor’s shirt and very short shorts. She was slender, fit, and her legs were fabulous. As she pedaled by, her blonde shag haircut tossed in the breeze. She was watching the traffic, so she didn’t look in our direction, but I could see her face was lightly freckled and extremely pretty. Her eyes were set wide apart and seemed to reflect a keen intelligence. She was smiling to herself about something. I had never seen her before, so I thought she must be one of the new kids. As she rode off, I said to Charlie, “Wow! Did you see her?” Charlie smiled at me and said, “That’s my friend Martina.” Even though this was the first time I’d seen her, I felt some kind of familiarity or maybe even kinship. I had to meet Martina.

  The following day, my afternoon class was Figure Painting, taught by Richard Merkin. I knew Richard a little bit but this was my first class with him. Painting is a hard thing to teach—in fact, some people say it can’t be done—but Richard was a great teacher. He was a true dandy, always dressed with tremendous flair. This day, his black hair was slicked straight back. He had a full mustache. He wore a voluminous, puffy white shirt open at the neck, with a red ascot, baggy khaki trousers, and black ballet pumps. His glasses were wire-rimmed and he was smoking English Ovals with a short cigarette holder. He was a trip!

  One of my friends, an effete and smart young guy named Gregor, and I were setting up our easels at one end of the studio when I realized Martina, who was wearing a khaki navy flyer’s jumpsuit, was setting up at the other end of the room, closer to the female model. The model was sitting in a tableau of brightly colored fabrics and café furniture, bottles, and glasses that Merkin had set up for us to paint. As our teacher prowled the room offering advice and encouragement, I didn’t want to stare, but all I could think about was this new girl. How should I introduce myself? What could I possibly say to her? Should I play it cool or come on strong? I didn’t know what to do. But then an opportunity presented itself.

  At the end of the class, Gregor sauntered over to her, took one look at the painting she was working on, and said, “Obviously, you have no idea what you’re doing.” I don’t know what he was thinking or why he would say such a thing, but she looked crestfallen. Here was my chance. I walked over to this beautiful girl and said, “I’m sorry about my friend’s bad manners. Obviously, he has no idea what he’s doing.” She smiled at me with a sense of relief and laughed. “I like this class,” she said. I told her I did, too. I said, “My name is Chris. It’s really good to meet you.” As she cleaned up her painter’s palette and packed up her paints, she turned to me, looked at me with her bright blue eyes, and said, “It’s nice to meet you, too. My name is Tina.”

  Later that evening, I spied Tina in the Refectory and asked her to join our table. I introduced her to the others at the table, including my girlfriend, Andi. During the conversation, we found out that Tina had transferred to RISD from Barnard College in New York City at the recommendation of her art history professor. When he saw her portfolio of drawings he told her, “If I could draw like that, I’d be going to RISD.” So, here she was! She had entered the summer Foundation program and felt much happier here than at Barnard. During the summer, she had made good friends with some other transfer students, including her boyfriend, architecture student Peter Coan. I had expected there would be a boyfriend. I mean, how could there not be? Peter was not with her tonight, however, and we had a long getting-to-know-you conversation. Tina said that she had two brothers and five sisters and they had moved around a lot because her father, Ralph, was a U.S. Navy officer and her mother, Laure, was from France. I told her, what a coincidence—my father was a U.S. Army officer. Further conversation revealed that her father was an admiral who had attended the Naval Academy. I told her that my father was a general and had attended West Point. During this period of time, because of the Vietnam War, there was a pretty strong antimilitary feeling among college students and young people in general. I think Tina and I felt a sense of camaraderie because we both knew that, despite the war in Vietnam, there were a lot of fine people in the military. We knew what it was like to be an officer’s kid.

  Tina when I met her.

  One thing about artists and art students is that we love to sit around talking and smoking. Another thing we had in common was that Tina and I both smoked Camels. So we talked and talked and smoked and smoked. I quickly realized that Tina had the gift of gab and could really hold forth in a conversation. She claimed to be a shy person, but once she came out of her shell there was no stopping her. I was fascinated, Andi was less so. After dinner we said good night to Tina and Andi turned to me and said, “I’ll bet she’s not even a real blonde.”

  8

  WORDS IN PAPERS, WORDS IN BOOKS

  Andi and I were happy together. We’d been dating for a year and we confided in each other and had some very good times together. She had a lot of seriously deep thoughts that she expressed very clearly and I was a good listener. She needed a good listener. I found out later that her parents were breaking up during this time and, naturally, this took its toll on her. She became judgmental of the other art school kids and she started pointing out my personal flaws. One time we were lying in the grass in front of her dormitory, enjoying the warm October sun, when she suddenly started enumerating all of my failings. She didn’t like it that I got high as often as I did. She thought I was an underachiever and should work harder and be more serious. I told her that I was painfully awar
e of my own inadequacies, but I was doing my best to be a good boyfriend to her and a good guy in general. She apologized, but it was obvious that something was really bothering her. I think we both had roving eyes at this point, but I still found her to be a beautiful and fascinating person. Stephen Sprouse, a younger guy we both knew casually, sat down beside us. He was dressed smartly in rust-colored corduroy Levi’s and a burgundy cashmere sweater over an oxford cloth shirt. Stephen was probably the most clean-cut guy in the whole school. He came from Indiana. He had only been at the school for a couple of months and intended to major in fashion design. He said, “I want to ask your advice. Halston wants me to come to New York and work for him. Do you think I should do it?” Halston was super popular at the time and had been recently featured on the cover of Time magazine. I imagined that, because Stephen was such a sweet kid, he might get chewed up and spit out by the fashion world. Still, it was a very tempting offer. A RISD degree is no guarantee of employment. Au contraire. I told him to go for it. Go visit with Halston and get the lay of the land first before leaving RISD. Andi completely agreed and that was the last I saw of Stephen until I met him again in 1976 when he was living in the same building as Debbie Harry and Chris Stein on the Bowery. He had become a protégé of Andy Warhol and was doing sensational work of his own. Debbie was his muse and he dressed her in a unique and edgy, glamorous style. He used a lot of bright red camouflage and and backward calligraphy in bright Day-Glo colors in his fabrics.

  I was out of the dormitory now and had moved into my own apartment at 161 Benefit Street upstairs from the fabulous Joe’s sandwich shop. Joe’s served deli-style sandwiches named after vintage movie stars, funky musicians, and local celebrities. They had a big wooden barrel of homemade pickles and the smell of them wafted upstairs throughout the entire building. It was a fun place to hang out. The wisecracking owner, Dewey Dufresne, was married to a lovely woman named Polly from Pittsburgh. Her parents were friends with my parents, so Dewey was always very nice to me and teased me a bit less than his other customers. Their son, who was a tiny baby named Wiley when I lived above his dad’s sandwich shop, would become a famous young chef in New York’s Lower East Side with his restaurant, wd~50, on Clinton Street.