[From Guilty of Everything (1990), starting page 281 of The Herbert Huncke Reader (William Morrow & Co., 1997): After a drug-related sojourn in Jacobi Hospital, Herbert Huncke returns to downtown life:]
The very first thing Elise told me when I arrived back on the scene was that there was a warlock in the vicinity. I had known very little about witches, warlocks, and these things, and have never actually questioned whether or not they exist. I have a whole slew of superstitions of my own but I’ve never associated them with anything like “magic”. Apparently this “warlock” – Bill Heine was his name – was a very powerful personality. He had swept both Janine and Elise off their feet.
Most important, as far as Elise was concerned, was that Bill was using amphetamine. And they thought that amphetamine would be a much better thing for me to use than heroin. Elise was very anti the heavier drugs, and she believed that amphetamine might help solve my junk problem. I said, “I’d certainly like to give it a try.” I’d heard a great deal about it. Both Elise and Janine spoke of it, and even Allen and Peter, when I stopped in on them, were commenting on it. Allen said something to the effect that I might find that I’d like it. “Instead of getting back onto the streets with a heroin habit, why don’t you try a little amphetamine? It’s not a bad drug.
I had used Benzedrine in the past, but they were talking about shooting amphetamine. I had never shot it before. In fact, I didn’t know it could be taken intravenously.
They were all very anxious for me to meet Bill, but the next person I heard about was the writer Alexander Trocchi, who was supposedly running some kind of college-of-the-streets type of thing on the Lower East Side. Because Trocchi was an experienced and first-rate writer, it was natural that he’d come in contact with Ginsberg. Between the two of them they were helping create something of a new scene in the Lower East Side.
Apparently Bill was spending a great deal of time with Trocchi. One night when I was visiting Allen he suggested that we go over to see Trocchi, and so we started out. We got as far as Avenue C, and as we turned the corner there was Trocchi coming our way. And who was with him but Bill. I frankly did not like Bill at all on first sight. I thought he was a very intriguing-looking person, though, what with his brown felt hat and beaded band, worn Indian style, and his shoulder bag made of leather and fur and fairly packed with books, and his flute. Every now and then, while others were talking, he would put the flute to his lips and blast a little tune.
[. . .]
Bill had already gained admittance to Elise’s establishment and thought nothing of knocking on her door at eleven o’clock and trooping in with five or six different people. A bass player, a drummer, say, a singer, a poet or two. Or perhaps a young girl who had shaved her head almost bald – enough to startle anyone in those days. The first thing Bill would do after bursting in was to whip out his paints and paint the Jewish good-luck symbol on the door. He then immediately began pulling things out of various pockets and pocketbooks while one guy was tuning up his bass and another was stroking his guitar.
Once there was a chick in the crowd who, upon entering, had found a table about half the size of a desk and turned it over. She’d brushed everything off the top of it, set it in a corner, and began to pull out a number of things from her bag, eventually surrounding herself with a homemade altar of a sort.
The shades would be pulled down and the next thing you knew there was a bottle of cobalt blue loaded with liquid amphetamine. Everyone immediately tied up. There was no fuss about who took off first – just let me get off, that was all. We all shot up and you could feel the vibrations in the room begin to change.
The portable RCA record player would be turned on to the sounds of Yardbird Parker, Nina Simone, Billie. I always expected the police at the door at any moment, but they never came. This would go on all night.
The day Janine said good-bye to Peter and went for a walk to wipe away her tears, she came back to a scene like this and Bill was waiting for her. He had set up his Buddha with rocks of varying kinds, urns full of incense wafting a lavender smoke into the air, music vibrating. She was pulled right in, needless to say.
This was the beginning of the whole Lower East Side scene. This kind of thing went on constantly. It was incredible. Supposing I suddenly knocked on your door and I’m standing there with about seven people. We all march in, shut the door, and you are trying to play host and discover at last that it doesn’t mean a thing. “Hey, man, who are you? Mike? Nice knowing you, Mike. There’s a corner. What do you do, paint? There’s plenty of paints. Do you blow? Fine, man, there’s a session going down.” I’d never witnessed anything like it. I’d never seen a group of people just walk in on somebody and literally take the place over.
Now the payoff is that when it came time for everyone to leave, nobody was about to move. This chick here had found her little niche. She’d curled up and gone to sleep, and refused to be bothered. “Come on, man, you’d better go.” “Please, leave me alone. I’m tired and I haven’t had any sleep.”
Bill always managed to build some kind of reclining area for himself in which he’d thrown pillows and cushions. He’d be there with a couple of chicks beside him talking away and they’d be listening. That man could talk. Though at one point he stopped talking. His tongue was cut out, not literally, but something happened to him and he just dried up. But in his prime he could command a discussion. He’d hold the floor and he wouldn’t leave either. Elise, whose place it was much of the time, was by then so exhausted that she could not hold her eyes open any longer and she’d snuggle up where she was and fall asleep.
And – self-appointed guardian of the establishment – I’d put my feet up on the table, get myself as comfortable as I possibly could, take a hefty fix of amphetamine, and proceed to write for the rest of the night. Much of what I wrote then is still around, fortunately. Some of the best things I wrote I did under amphetamine, though some of the stuff is a bit lost, even to me.
[. . .]
On the strength of the relationship between Janine and Bill our whole circle of friends began to change. It was a pretty horrendous affair in many respects because it changed Janine from a very innocent and beautiful young girl into a – well, still beautiful, but also a more worldly and cynical woman. I suppose, though, it’s to her benefit, because today she is a very wise woman and there aren’t many that can put anything over on her.
Now that Allen and Peter were gone they weren’t the focal point any longer. When they left for India there were still three weeks left on their rent, so I moved into their place for the three weeks. Naturally, the first thing Bill did was bring over several of his friends and take the place over.
When Bill first hit New York he was an innocent little drummer boy – but a good good one. How he originally got involved in the Village scene I don’t know. All of a sudden, it seemed, he blossomed into a leader. He had been very close to Trocchi, and when Trocchi left, Bill took his place. Trocchi had to leave because his place was raided one night by the cops and because of various legal problems; he decided the best thing to do for the time being was to split the scene rather than come to the attention of the cops.
Bill came with several strange and powerful personalities in tow. I say powerful because they emanated a certain amount of energy that you could almost feel when in their presence. Very dynamic people.
Bill, incidentally, was one of the most creative persons I’ve ever known. He could take a white sheet, fold it in such a way that it was the size and shape of a skull, wrap yards of silk thread around it to keep it together, and then inject it with a huge hypodermic needle filled with paint. He would draw various colors up into the needle and jab it into the sheet again and again. He’d work on it for about an hour and then snip the threads and open up the sheet until it fell apart like a chrysalis with the most exquisite colorings you’ve ever seen. He made the most beautiful hangings, and every time he left a pad invariably there’d be one of these hangings left on the wall of the place. It was all so fantastic, actually, what with all the ritual that went into it.
When Bill unloaded his shoulder bag he’d pull out more from his store of tricks. He had a brass Buddha, all kinds of precious and semiprecious stones – amethyst, topaz, carnelian – and he’d fashion an altar for himself. It got to be a nightly ritual with him. In fact, it got so he didn’t even take it down after he settled in.
At one point I tried to get him to show his work in a gallery, but the gallery people weren’t willing to take the risk, saying that the only way the hangings could be appreciated properly would be to have them stretched and exhibited in such a way that light would be able to shine through them. They did not have the facilities to accommodate him. He did have beautiful stuff, no question about that. In fact, he was probably the first to invent tie-dye. It’s amazing how popular it’s become since then.
Bill had something about him too that attracted a certain type of person to him. For example, there was this young chick named Rita who happened on the scene for a short time. She’d wear long black dresses and black boots. She knew a great deal about stones and wood, things that I’m sure she must have studied at one time. She also wrote some very good poetry. And there were times, as well, when she’d become completely inarticulate. You know, I don’t know what finally became of her. She may be dead, although I ran into someone not too long ago that told me she’d been in the hospital. I’d rather that she be dead, I think, than end in a hospital, because she was such a free individual. She loved her freedom. She was the kind of person that would run down the street and laugh simply because she was running, or who would put on a dance performance on a corner for the joy of it.
There were many others in Bill’s orbit, some that I did not cotton to. I found a few just a little too treacherous for me. When we left Allen’s, and had sort of wrecked the place, Bill, Janine, and myself moved in with Elise once more. Eventually, we found a place of our own on East Sixth Street.
[. . .]
From that point on, our scene became even more outrageous. There’d usually be ten or twelve people in the place at a time and the record player would be going full blast with Charlie Parker, of course, or with some incredibly fine Afghanistan teahouse records. Also, a friend of Allen’s had made some beautiful recordings of the kef festivals in Morocco where everyone pitches in and sings, beats on drums, blows whistles. Ravi Shankar was becoming popular about then in America, and we had too some fantastic Indian records. So there was music going day and night, and a continual stream of people. Some were painting, some were building things or making things – just a lot of action and movement.
Alex Trocchi moved into the apartment. At that time there was still a case pending against him which would finally force him into sneaking out of the city again, across the Canadian border, and eventually into leaving for England from Canada. When he was living with us, though, he and Bill would do some remarkable things together with wood and knives. I can remember Trocchi with this knife that must have been a regulation hunter’s knife. He had acquired at least two- or three-inch-long tracks on his arms as an addict, and he’d allow them to scab over. He had a habit of standing with one of these knives underneath a bright lightbulb, picking the scabs off with the point of the knife.
The scene continued on all that summer and into fall, and then it went kaput. Too many notorious people came into the place. There were scenes, there were fights, there were people running out into the streets. Then it got so bad that some got to burning each other. A guy would come up with thirty or forty dollars to cop an ounce of A with and someone else would go south with it. Also, too many junkies came into the scene.
So things fell apart…
My first visitor was Bill Heine. He’d somehow discovered where I was. He had been moving around himself from place to place, in and out of the scene. But meanwhile there was a whole new mob of people that had entered into it. The Lower East Side was becoming the “East Village.” If I thought for a moment I could name dozens that were new to the scene just then – many of them painters and writers.
Bill came to see me and dumped his things down, saying, “I guess I can work here.”
“That’s nice,” I said in response. “It’s OK with me. Just don’t take over the entire place. I want my own location.” But all Bill’s friends immediately found out where he was and there were big scenes at all hours of the day and night. Someone was always demanding to see Bill and I was supposed to see to it that no one disturbed the master and his work. Finally, of course, it got to be too much.
It wasn’t Bill that bothered me in the place. He could do what he wanted. He could paint the walls, paint his pictures – that didn’t bother me. All I wanted was peace, to be left alone. Of course I didn’t get it, because he had too many people coming in and out.
Finally, one of his cohorts from way back showed up. His name was Rob, and Rob was someone I have never liked. He repulsed me, and I did not trust him. Bill, though, had allowed him into the place and so he would come and go. Okay, I could deal with that, as long as he didn’t make a headquarters out of our place.
Toward spring, when Bryden had decided to go back to San Francisco and Bill had sort of vanished into the unknown, I was somehow stuck with this guy Rob. I wasn’t big enough to manhandle him and force him out. I was getting tired of the pad but I wanted the satisfaction of proving to the bastard that I was not going to tolerate him coming in and taking over.
At last, I confronted Rob. I told him, “Listen, I think you’ve stayed long enough. I want the place for myself now. I’m not going to stay here much longer but I need a rest and I want you to leave.”
“Look, Huncke,” he answered, “you get one thing straight. I never leave a pad until I’m ready, for one thing, and I never leave until it’s broken up either. I’ve decided to break this place up. Now what are you going to do about it?”
I said to him that there wasn’t much I could do, but that I was going out for a walk now and when I got back he’d better be gone. This was all just talk. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to do.
While out walking, I bumped into a guy I knew casually who was carrying a machete. He asked me if I’d like to have it. “Man, what am I going to do with a machete?” I said, but then I stopped. “Oh-oh, wait just a minute. Yeah, I would like to have it. I’m going to clean up a place. You want to come along and watch?”
We started back over to the apartment. I unlocked the door and here’s Rob in the center of the place, stripped down to his trousers, swaggering around with a couple of his friends. It was like a madhouse and I was sick of it.
I happened to have a pair of boots on, and when I walked in saying, “Look, Rob, you see this?” I slapped the machete against a boot. It made a nice loud snap. “Now look, I want you out of here, and I mean I want you out right away. I wouldn’t advise you to force me to use this. Now get out.” I was shaking. I am not a violent person, but I had made up my mind that if he gave me any trouble I was willing to at least slap him with the broad part of that knife, and he knew it. He turned white.
One idiot that was with him was laughing, saying, “Come on, Rob, why don’t you start breaking up the place?” I told him to shut up or he’d be next. Rob said, “Jesus, Huncke, oh man, let me get my clothes.”
“Get them and get them fast.”
Finally they left, and I was delighted. I closed the door and that was the end of Rob.
[. . .]
About this time the ODs started. You’d hear of somebody, and boom! The next day he ODed. It got to be quite sordid, this ODing thing. From having been a really exciting and exhilarating scene, it had passed into a session of chaos. And it began to decay. Things were rotten, and more and more people were getting sick or dying. The pace had picked up so frantically that a lot of people just flipped completely, or simply disappeared altogether.
