A Guide to the Pads
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING A Guide to the Pads By Stanley Edgar Hyman I moved out of Manhattan early in 1945, shortly after Peter Minuit bought it from the Indians, and since then I have dwelt among...
...Here there is least social mixing...
...He says The Hot Five...
...Anything, so long as it is not about race...
...Manny demonstrates how that is handled too...
...Annette then reveals her proud pedigree: "I made it with Bird once...
...The artists wear "J...
...I'm sending my secretary down for some goods...
...He tells when and how to visit, how many visitors a patient may have in a day, how violent patients are quieted, even what the social life is like (at a dance, "all the old ladies . . . jive with the spades...
...Suppose our tourist wants a girl...
...When, scavenging one night, Manny brings home some barrel hoops he has tied together with wire, a pseudo-Jewish painter tells him how he could succeed as a junk sculptor, with the help of a dealer named Alice...
...Mostly it is marijuana or Indian hemp, called "pot...
...Gelber offers a map: "The daring old men searched the aisles for a young man or girl as they were wont...
...This involves "boosting" groceries, as we see Louise demonstrate on the telephone: "Hello, this is Mrs...
...The next morning there is a knock at Manny's door, and there is Louise, "her suitcase at her feet...
...It's much easier to score at an expensive store...
...I say Pollock...
...However, the book's characters discuss the effects that various drugs have on them, and it is clear that there is nothing— with the exception, perhaps, of a plastic bag full of airplane glue—that they have not tried...
...The queens stayed in the toilet until the pock-faced ushers threw them oui...
...Perhaps he would like to go to a party...
...Gelber's hip exemplar, Manny Fells, prepares a list in anticipation of a conversation with a bookseller: "He shows me Rembrandt pornography...
...As such, it lacks all the conventional elements of a novel: plot, characters, theme, and so forth...
...Probably won't try...
...What is the entertainment at such a party...
...One cannot...
...The next panting amateur ethnologist who asks to be put in touch with the real New York will be handed a copy of Jack Gelber's On Ice (Macmillan, 311 pp., $4.95) and sent on his way...
...When his friend Nelson appears at Manny's place with a girl named Louise, "a thin, neat, busty girl," Manny finds occasion during the evening to tell her that he thinks she is very serious...
...The dealers and collectors wear suits and dresses...
...What sort of party...
...The best sort of pot is "volcanic from Mexico," whatever that means...
...Gelber is more than helpful...
...Much better than working, though, is being an artist...
...As for the employment agency, each time that its representative telephones for its commission, the jobholders pretends "to be a member of one or another minority group...
...a friend would corroborate all the lies...
...he asks winningly...
...I'm Sonia...
...This makes me useless to eager tourists who want tips on making the New York hip scene, but they keep coming...
...The subject of drugs must be fearlessly investigated, since, like an Indian peyote cult, this culture is centered in shared drug-taking...
...The other jobs were out of town and made purposely difficult to check...
...Unfortunately, On Ice is not offered as a guidebook, but as a novel...
...Dancing to live jazz, while the artists tell stories about the rapacity of dealers, and the dealers tell stories about the irresponsibility of artists...
...He scouts bars until he encounters a friend's girl...
...For other expenses, one passes fraudulent checks, and here too Gelber offers good advice: Avoid Macy's...
...Here the crowd is less mixed: there are only artists, former artists, and their friends, and a sprinkling of uptown dealers and collectors...
...While he is in the shower, Richard's girl Annette, a stranger to Manny, appears in a dressing gown to comb her hair...
...Suppose the visitor wants to find his way around in a 42nd Street movie house...
...Perhaps our tourist is interested in more strenuous cultural pursuits than gaping...
...This wins the jackpot, because, as Louise says...
...A higher status party is held in an artist's studio...
...And you said that I was very serious...
...Manny shows how it is done...
...Now I have a solution...
...The result is not an offbeat novel but a junk sculpture, and no one need take it seriously...
...In short, here is a guidebook that tells everything anyone might want to know about the New York hip world, even how to settle down in it...
...WRITERS & WRITING A Guide to the Pads By Stanley Edgar Hyman I moved out of Manhattan early in 1945, shortly after Peter Minuit bought it from the Indians, and since then I have dwelt among untrodden ways...
...Have I read big D?" What does one say to Negroes...
...I say Nabokov...
...Monody...
...But perhaps our tourist does want a girl for immoral purposes...
...I say Monk...
...What heavy artistic names are being dropped these days...
...The diaphragm, in turn, shows her respect for him...
...The highest status party is held in a loft not used as a studio...
...What does he want her for...
...It is not Manny's intention to go to her place and do anything, merely to take her as a date to a party, but the sexual formula is apparently necessary to show his respect for her...
...In the balconies there were sailors with fat little girls, and a few heads turning on—giggling at every cliché piece of dialogue...
...Pastor...
...One must not quit but be fired, in order to be eligible for unemployment insurance without a month's wait, and one then gives the unemployment office a story so good that it is "impossible for them to find another job for him...
...He says Henry Miller...
...There is a good chance that Alice will offer to support you while you are working on new things...
...Tccch...
...I guess everyone always takes me for a nut...
...Easiest thing in the world...
...Gelber achieved a great critical success with his offbeat play...
...This appears to have persuaded him that one could write a novel, too, without bothering about form...
...He says De Kooning...
...He says Cage...
...What is the entertainment at such parties...
...Holding a job is acceptable, provided that one gets it with a "phony resume," cheats the employment agency out of its commission, and only holds the job long enough to be eligible for unemployment insurance...
...He says McGraw...
...Here there is a mixture of worlds: corporation lawyers, models, addicts, schoolteachers...
...It is always possible that the visitor will find himself so enamored of the hip scene that he decides to settle down in it, in which case he will need some advice about making a living...
...In the book's toniest single reference, Gelber describes Manny talking to a female patient at Bellevue, and categorizing her fate: "From Bonnard to Kline, thought Manny...
...C. Penney work shirts, playing Steinbeck fruit pickers," or else they wear "paint-streaked pants and brand-new army sweaters, each of them sporting a moustache or long hair or a gold earring" (I think Gelber means the people, not the clothes, to be doing these things...
...I say Stengel...
...The painter explains: "If I were you, I'd turn out two or three pieces and then call her up...
...The party with lowest status, apparently, is held in a fancy apartment...
...When a "stud" named Richard leaves to get more cocaine, Manny asks the host if he may take a shower...
...The Connection...
...Manny "had given up race talk with Negroes a long time ago...
...Annette is, of course, only a temporary girl...
...I say Genet...
...The entertainment is listening to radio music, and if our panting ethnologist can get himself invited to such a party, he has it made...
...I say George Kelly...
...He says Miles...
...A date...
...It is surely all the guidebook that anyone needs...
...There is nothing in On Ice about how one injects heroin into the veins, since that is the preoccupation of Gelber's play The Connection...
...Why don't we go over to your place and I'll do nasty things to you...
...Elsewhere, A says orgone box, ? says goofballs...
...They couple as wordlessly and savagely as minks...
...It is mainly smoked at parties, but it is also smoked in movie balconies (thus the "turning on" in the first quotation above), on the street, even on the job...
...I say China...
...But perhaps our ethnologist doesn't want to get quite that involved in the hip scene, just to observe it...
...If our visitor finds turning on, which is apparently not habit-forming, too mild a kick, Gelber will teach him how one sniffs cocaine through a tightly rolled dollar bill...
...It is smoked in a cigarette called a "joint," or in an ordinary pipe...
...I shouldn't care if they were as shoddily put together as the barrel hoops...
...It would be quite wrong of the ethnologist to ask a native girl if she has read Dostoevski, but if he does here is the answer he will get: "Man...
...The girl obediently gets up and leaves with him, stopping off in the ladies' room to put in her diaphragm...
...She probably won't be able to sell them...
...Call her up then and show her two or three pieces and I think you'll find she will offer to take them...
...Why...
...And I am serious...
...Dancing to the phonograph, and knocking the host...
...He goes to a party at which everyone is taking drugs...
...In truth, it has two plots, but after a while Gelber tires of one— Manny's adventures as a company spy in a discount house—and discards it, and the other—Manny's decline into the middle class—does not make its appearance until the book's last page...
...The secret of the resume is offered freely: "The telephone number for the phony job was real...
...I say The Blue Devils...
...The only light is a few candles, and a number of hip persons of various sexes lie around on the floor smoking pot...
...I say Partch...
...He says Israel...
...A hipster can live by his wits...
...Perhaps our friend wants a permanent, move-in girl...
...First, if one is not lucky enough to be a Jew, he must pretend to be a Jew, because of "the art world's predilection for Jews...
...The end of the world of drugs, of course, is Bellevue, and Gelber quite properly offers a guide to its reaches too...
...I have a charge there...
...Manny shows him how to manage that effortlessly...
...I say Hiroshige...
...He says Tennessee...
...He says Ionesco...
Vol. 47 • August 1964 • No. 15
