Gemütlichkeit / Larry Fagin
Austria 1952-55. Everybody — military, civilians, dependents — was at least selling cartons of cigarettes. I started at age 14 by scrounging as many ration cards as I could (my own, my family’s, my schoolmates, and a few G.I friends) and hitting all the P.X.’s. I was making an average profit of 500% and that was still a good deal for the Austrians, Germans, Hungarians, Rumanians, et al. After a while, I added pipe tobacco and jam. Then Levi’s and t-shirts. In 1954 Willi Boehm, a bartender and jack-of-all-trades, who had been a dog catcher in Minsk and a waiter on Heinrich Himmler’s private train, took me under his wing and sent me to Switzerland to deliver bags of antique gold. At 15, for a short time, I got involved with some G.I.’s who sold jerrycans of gasoline out of a truck. That was a little risky. Finally, Willi B connected me with a family of Rumanian Jews who were changing money (military scrip or green dollars into schillings). I’d be walking around Salzburg with thousands of dollars in a satchel thinking I was the coolest kid in Western Europe. And at the end of the day, I had plenty of take-home money. I ate Sacher Torte buried under mountains of Schlag and never gained an ounce. I ate cevapcici, raznjici, and Topfenpalatschinken.
For one semester. I transferred to an international boarding school in Vienna, not far from Schönbrunn Palace. Vienna was in the Russian Zone and, like Berlin, was itself divided into American, French, English, and Russian mini-zones. Black market was booming and I made good pin money with cigarettes. On weekends, we came home to Salzburg, traveling on the Orient Express, no less.
On one of those 12 hour trips, a schoolmate, Dick Weissman, loaned me his Obelisk Press paperback of Tropic of Cancer. That changed things. In the summer I had a part-time job at KLM, the Dutch airlines. My boss was a young man named Manfred Bartelmuss, but for some reason everyone called him Kelly. He became my friend and contact for just about everything crooked and straight. We once attended a Fasching ball, Kelly dressed as Faust and I as Mephistopheles, on my hands and knees in a black poodle costume. I was sweating buckets and the girls wouldn’t stop petting me. I also sang and played double-handle guitar with an Austrian zither player at the White Cross Inn, and was the rhythm guitar in a honky tonk quartet of hillbilly G.I.’s. Sunday afternoons I strolled with my parents in the Mirabell Gardens and attended concerts at the Mozarteum. In Winter of 1954, I tried to ski at Kitzbuehl and almost killed myself. Three broken ribs, a broken nose, a pulverized elbow and a weird neckbone rearrangement.
By mid-1955, a treaty was signed with the Russians, the occupation was over and the Americans went home. I’ve omitted the side-trips (Paris, Munich, Amsterdam), many of the interesting people, the faux-bohemianism, and all the fumbling sex.
Denham (Buckinghamshire) and London 1966-67. As an unserious art history student, under the aegis of my cousin, Professor Aaron Scharf of St. Martin’s College of Art, I was somehow allowed to study and handle drawings and prints at the exclusive Warburg Institute. I’d come in on the train from Denham (20 min.) three mornings a week, wash my hands, put on white cotton gloves, and sit at a table looking at drawings by Samuel Palmer, John Linnell, George Richmond, Blake and Duerer. I also visited Slade School, where Aaron’s wife, Marina, was secretary to William Coldstream. There I acquired a taste for early 20th century British cityscapes. For a while I lived in Denham Court, in the room where Dryden wrote his “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day.” St. Mary’s Church, with its crenelated, supposedly Norman, tower was a tourist stop. Nearby were the disused J. Arthur Rank Studios, where the unfinished “I, Claudius” was shot, starring Charles Laughton, as well as some of Michael Powell’s great films from the 1940s.
This was the “Swinging England” period and I was spending most of my time in London. For style, I didn’t go in much for hippy gear but instead found a Greek tailor in Soho who made up two beautiful Saville Row-type suits, one double-breasted. So I was more Cambridge than Carnaby Street. When I wasn’t at the Warburg, I’d take an even earlier train to Marylebone Station and a taxi to Hyde Park, where I could smoke hashish unobserved. Then, ripped out of my head, I moved on to the Swedish Coffee Shop in the Hilton for pancakes and sausages. Back to the park to read Milton or some such, until it was time for a matinee of “The Mousetrap” or another play in Soho. If the first act was boring, I’d hop across the square for the second act of a different play. Tickets were cheap. Then maybe I’d wind up at the British Museum or at Indica Books (managed by Barry Miles) or Better Books (Bob Cobbing).
Ultimately, I rented a flat in Hampstead near the heath for nine pound a week. I saw the early appearances of Jimi Hendrix at the Bag O’ Nails and The Marquee, Little Richard at the Saville Theatre, and frequented UFO Club and the Roundhouse (first performance of Cream). But I was more interested in the experimental music of Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra and improvisation groups like AMM. Also, I was spending a lot of time abroad (Italy, France, Holland) and never felt settled anywhere or became attached to a group or clique. At least until Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh showed up and convinced me that it was “all happening in Manhattan.”
Aimless wandering is a good way to achieve world peace. You don’t know where you are and you’re not trying to find out. So you can’t get “lost.” The technique is to drop everything and walk around cities and towns in a trance. The familiar immediately becomes strange if you’re on the right frequency. Looking up helps — upper floors and tops of buildings and church spires, roof bosses, gargoyles, cornices, obscure deco tiles and double glazes, various finials and ornaments, spires, gables, knobs. And down — sidewalk cracks with weeds, bird behavior (they walk, too), chemical puddles and their reflections, a lost baby shoe. People become blurs, even those with neon magenta impetigo. If you let them in it breaks the spell. Save them up for a different walk.
I walked around like a zombie in Albi, with its spooky cathedral and horrifying history of the slaughter of the Cathars on Montsegur in 1244. You can look it up. And for a fun read, try The Cathars and Reincarnation by Arthur Guirdham. Our friend Michel Grezès took Susan and me on a long complicated walk to the edge of town. We came to a 17th century farmhouse with a small restaurant belonging to Michel’s family, where we were served a carrot soup with fresh herbs from the garden, a small trout caught that morning, and a mysterious large black sausage—the most delicious thing I ever tasted. We never learned what it was.
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