This is what I know – Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. My dog, who was dead in 1957, is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.
I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and my strong ones. My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.
Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.
Nobody sees as we do, Patti” he said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was as if we were the only two people in the world.
Nothing bothered me, not even the things that bothered me.
Some things are not lost but sacrificed.
I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.
I could feel the gravitational pull of home, which when I’m home too long becomes the gravitational pull of somewhere else.
A wind picked up and I could feel the sea within it.
The dark stone in my heart pulsed quietly, igniting like a coal in a hearth. Who is in my heart? I wondered.
It was an unexpected encounter that slowly altered the course of my life.
I was thinking about what a magical portal this lobby was when the heavy glass door opened as if swept by wind and a familiar figure in a black and scarlet cape entered. It was Salvador Dali. He looked around the lobby nervously, and then, seeing my crow, smiled. He placed his elegant, bony hand atop my head and said: “You are like a crow, a gothic crow.
Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?
I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.
Those were mystical times. An era of small pleasures.
For a brief moment I felt as if I might die; and just as quickly I knew everything would be all right.
I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.
William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.
Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.
But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.