The Night I Picked Up Andy Warhol In My Taxicab.
By me. (Paul Hall)
It was a dark, hot summer night. I was combing through lower Manhattan in my cab towards the latter half of my shift. Maybe sometime around two in the morning. Someone was just standing there in the middle of an intersection, I could see the figure a couple of blocks away. Standing there in a solid shiny purple silk suit waiting calmly, not flinching an inch. There he was, old Soup Cans himself, Andy Warhol. Not another cab in sight. Not another car in sight. For a brief moment of time, the after midnight dirty mauve reality of downtown New York was about to imitate the very art it had bred in it's mechanized 20th century bowels. We were about to do a U-turn on tarnished practicality and transform a small segment of synthetic city existence into a work of live Pop Art : "The Fare".
Most of my recollection has faded by now. It was in 1970 and I was trying to get enough finances to get to France. Money was scarce once again and I was trying to find somewhere to finish my art education at least to the title of Bachelor of Fine Arts.
3 years in the army. 1966 to 1969. It had taken it's toll. I had been there long enough as a volunteer to realize that I usually clashed with those in authority. I wasn't being a trouble maker and the figures in authority were nice enough, usually, but there seemed to be some mysterious difference in the way we thought. I as an artist and they as whatever. Still, I always got along, but at great stress to all concerned. We always got to the point where we would enter the realm of the unorthodox and then they could not only be the leaders, but also get credit for unusual successes. But I had to count my blessings. When I joined the army in September of 1966, I really didn't expect to make it through my three years alive. So many didn't.
So as soon as my three years were up, I headed to California and the California College of Arts and Crafts where I had been accepted. Down the block (College Avenue) from Berkley University and People's Park, you'll find the art school. Actually Berkley is on one end of College Avenue and CCAC is on the other. The apartment beside the ice cream factory (and it's silver roof), across the street from a gas station, on that street was where I got my first lodgings after getting to Oakland in August of '69, which turned out to be somewhere in the middle between the two schools. I used to get free Ice Cream from what was left over from the delivery trucks when they finished their runs for the day. At night I took to sleeping on the roof. In those days I had an aversion to getting too soft. I knew the future held a hard road for me. I usually got up before dawn when the constellation Orion had risen a bit over the Texaco sign across the street.
During those months the focal point of my existence became the old CCAC auditorium. They had a new auditorium and library complex at the school, all ultra modern for the late sixties. The old auditorium had become the location of something they called the "Pilot Project" which almost served as a sort of a spillover for the too many applicants they had accepted to the school.
The whole California idea might have been something I would later consider a bad move. I mean, I probably would have done better trying to just stay put in Washington and attend the Corcoran School of Art as I had been doing on my off duty time during my service, and where I got a lot of art work done (what I called my Washington Period). But I wanted to get as far away from Washington as I could. Pentagon phobia had gotten hold of me. Plus, during my time there I had uncovered some disturbing things about the place. But it turned out to be a good move after all for lots of really strange reasons too numerous to account in this article.
So there was a rag tag bunch of students that found themselves enrolling in a radical new sort of open class situation in the old auditorium. When I got to school to enroll, I discovered they had taken on more students than they had space for. Enrollment day was mobbed. So many idealists all wanting to be artists and most of them stoned as well. It was a Spaced Artissy. There I was in the midst of this polychromatic crowd, everyone dressed in garish colors, and me in my gray work clothes, clean shaven, short hair, gray snap-brim hat, blue tie, and my ex-army combat boots. Oddly enough, lots of them got mad at me, because by trying to be unobtrusive, I ended up being the only one who stood out from the crowd, as it were, making the rest of them be conformists.
So I ended up in the spillover program and then ended up in the auditorium along with about fifty others who didn't want to wait a couple of years till there was enough space for them in the regular classes. If I remember correctly, they even made us students clean up the mess in the place because I remember reading in my notebook, that, during the cleanup, someone handed me a bag of human waste to dispose of on the first day. But I was in no position to wait a few more years to get my art career going. So what if it was unusual? We got the same degree and the same quality of teaching if not better.
Lost the apartment because of the homeless guys sleeping on the roof . To get there they stepped on the factory's roof and caused it to leak In a town like Oakland with those universities, there seemed at least at that time to be a shortage of living space. I soon found lots of guys who needed somewhere to stay. Pretty soon there were about ten or twelve or more of us sleeping on the roof. We would get in and out through my bathroom window and though I told 'em not to, a lot of them walked on the ice cream factory roof instead of climbing up a ledge and caused it to leak. Well, I didn't get evicted, but since I got in trouble for it, I left the apartment. Plus there were problems trying to get people to clean up. The bottom line was that I wasn't getting any artwork done.
To make ends meet, I became a squatter. I ended up staying at the auditorium back stage where there were some balconies. I was hoping nobody saw me, but I'm sure they all knew. It was a tough time and most of us knew our world was being turned upside down and that from now on we had to adapt and live differently if we were going to survive. I'm sure there are some of them out there to this very day, living on a shoestring, making low-fire pottery in all-night sand pits on the beach, listening to homemade music. Ready for the end. They'll be more ready than the rest of us.
Things were going alright until the rear cable on my bicycle broke and I was stuck going down College Avenue in the rain in high gear. It was bound to happen eventually, but what annoyed me is that normally I was the type to change cables before they disintegrated. I was going about thirty mph or so when a Latin American Affairs student stopped short just in front of me. I hit the rear bumper and did a flip over his car.
With a serious gash on my left forearm the student drove me to three hospitals before a nice doctor sewed me up in secret. The other hospitals had turned me down because of insufficient funds. The wound was about a half inch deep and you could see a vein run from one side of the injury to the other with nothing underneath it for a bit. The gash was three inches long. The doctor said the stitches should come out six weeks later (I then pulled them out myself as I was too poor for the doctor, but it was too soon, the wound opened up and to this day I have the 3-inch scar as a souvenir). It was a long walk but I walked to the apartment where two old army buddies, Orosz and Deihl, were sharing the rent on a place. They insisted I stay there with them.
After my bicycle got repaired, I rode about 32 hills from the apartment to school. At the end of the first semester I had just about run out of funds. I found a shack beside the road a few blocks from CCAC and the rent was so cheap, I took it. By that time, Orosz had returned to Chicago and Deihl shared the rent with me at the shack. I slept on the floor on a piece of cardboard and that suited my ascetic nature fine. While still a soldier back at Washington, D.C., I had had the foresight to buy a down filled sleeping bag at an army surplus store downtown and that little sleeping bag kept me warm on those cold nights for the next four years.
That was where I really began to get some art work done. I had left school because the GI bill wasn't enough for the tuition. That was during what I call my Oakland Period. Deihl and I tried most of the time to find menial labor jobs to raise some money, but a recession had hit the United States.
Fortunately, I met a wealthy lady one day when I went into a super market to get two tubs of yogurt for Deihl and myself while job hunting. I was in a hurry and a lady criticized me for my appearance and that I had cut in front of her. I was in my gray work clothes and army fatigue cap, beard and long hair. I apologized and let her in front of me, and she saw us in the parking lot eating our yogurt, came over and made friends with us. Ginny was a big help for a while. She helped us with the rent and brought us food. Almost drove Deihl nuts with her art work that she did in a little space reserved in our studio for her. She had thought up a new movement called "candleism" in which she brought old candle ends, lit them, and stuck them one on the other on Chianti bottles and such like.
Then the rainy season hit. Probably came from Hawaii as the meteorological "Pineapple Express". We put a can under each leak as it appeared until finally the resultant din was like a crescendo of some discordant contemporary symphony. Finally the ceiling plaster fell on Randy when he was taking a nap and that was it. With the help of Tod's friend, Kay, we moved into a great bargain I had found. It was a place across the street from Black Panther Headquarters where, for some reason, nobody wanted to live. We never had any problems. It was a place in an apartment building that had survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Tod said that he was sure it was something I had found because it was painted in gray. I was known over there as "The Grey Flash", because I would flash by on my Gitanne ten speed bicycle always dressed in my gray work clothes.
I sold a pint of blood for ten dollars and we went down to the food co-op and got enough soy beans and wheat germ and peanut butter to survive a month on, and former classmate Chris and his friend Roger moved in and we lived a month on those rations, with what we found in Tilden park such as bay leaves, miners lettuce and sage and, oh yes, the ice cream. Finally Kay's brother hitched in from Vermont and convinced us we should head cross country to greener pastures.
So a month later, Ginni helping us, with new boots with Swiss vibrum soles, our paint boxes in our hands and back packs full of homemade muesli for food, Deihl and I walked out to the road, stuck out our thumbs and were on our way. The first night was in L.A., the next near the Grand Canyon, the third in New Mexico traveling over one hundred miles per hour along route sixty-six. The next morning, after sleeping comfortably on the desert sands, I stopped in a coffee shop to find a post card. I found one all right, which had a picture of all the nocturnal poisonous critters we had shared our sandy beds with such as side winders, scorpions, and a bunch of other things. But they had left us alone. I slept so soundly I never heard a thing.
The next day passing through Texas, we came to a little town where I spent the largest chunk of the six dollars I had to my name. I bought an expensive bottle of Dr. Pepper when I was told by the old Texan that the biggest part of the cost was the bottle. I poured the liquid into my canteen and asked for the deposit on the bottle. The man looked at me and just said twice, "You done paid for it".
While waiting for rides, one of the group that had accumulated at one place decided to eat ants one at a time. We were all kind of hungry and I recounted an article I read in Life magazine back in the fifties sometime about Aborigines children waiting by an ant hill and eating the ants one at a time as they emerged from the ground or sometimes getting a pile of ants the size of an apple and eating them as a snack. He picked up one and tasted it, commented on how sour it tasted and left it at that. I started to get heat exhaustion, but looking around I found an old straw hat with a slightly torn brim stuck in a tumble weed. I was getting sun burned through my shirt.
Later that evening at another place along the road we slept rough again with a group of others that hadn't gotten rides. One of them staring up at the moon while lying down squinting with his head tilted so as to see it upside down kind of surprised us all by saying that the man in the moon had another face. Sure enough, the upside down moon has a different face. In the Northern Hemisphere we are familiar with the lovely "Mona Lisa" kind of face the moon appears to have, but in the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth, they see the moon the other side up, since the Earth is a sphere. Once I asked a lady in Sydney, Australia, if she agreed that the moon was lovely. She said blankly that "...if you've seen one moon, you've seen them all...". I realized that the face in the moon seen in the land down under was almost horrifying. If you bother envision a face when you look at it down there, the image you see is somewhat akin to a head-hunter from a Walt Disney Cartoon from the days of Steam Boat Mickey.
What seemed to me at the time to be half way across the country, somewhere east of St Louis, Deihl and I separated. I went to Washington, D.C. and then to New York City and Deihl went up to Chicago to meet Orosz who later gave him a ride to New York where I met him at another ex-army buddy's loft where I had been staying for about a week. Air, Orosz and I were spec fives who shared the same barracks room (where I did the drawing "Twelve to Seven") at the south base of Fort Meyers in Arlington, Virginia just next to the Pentagon. We all happened to be artists, or at least we had all gone to art schools. I still have one of Air's sketch books. He was going to throw it away, so I asked and he gave it to me.
Twelve to Seven.
Kay's brother decided to stay there for a while. He was already annoyed at us for, as he called it, "burning" across the country. He wanted to take a few weeks at the Grand Canyon, while Randy and I were trying to get to New York in a hurry (if he thought that was fast, another time in '79 I hitched across the country from Washington State to Washington, D.C. in three and one-half days). While Randy hitched north, Kay's brother (I can't seem to be able to remember his name yet) and I pooled our remaining money, got a cheap room, washed up and even saw a movie. It was M.A.S.H., which had just come out about that time. The next day and flat broke, I headed east solo.
So Dave Air put me up for a while in his loft in the Bowery. I looked out the window and all down the street, I could see little signs that said "A.I.R." which I soon found out meant "Artist In Residence". All along the avenue outside the homeless bedded down on cardboard for the night. In the morning's first light you could see them rising from their corrugated paper beds, yawning and stretching, in countless numbers disappearing into the distance in the polluted mist.
Well, I couldn't stay at Dave's place and just paint for a living, I wouldn't have minded, but it wasn't going to turn out to be that simple. So I would have to go out and do something else and quick. So it was Air's idea for me to try and apply for a job as a cab driver, that even in a recession cab driving would be viable. He was right. At the time, they needed hacks in New York. I was breezed through. The companies even paid for our physical exams. On the way to the test we were given a sheet of the answers to study in the subway. So before long I had what most people would describe as a "real" job. In those days it wasn't bad. The companies paid a salary on a scale from minimum to how much you brought in for the night and you kept your tips. Everything else you turned in.
Over in California Deihl and Orosz told me about how art school was free in Paris, France. I listened to their plans to go to L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts, just across the river Seine from the Louvre, one of the best art museums in the world. So what I planed to do was use the tips for food and save the salary for the trip. I finally found a cheap apartment on the lower East Side near Delancy Street, I think it was somewhere around Orchard and Stanton streets (I forget now), in what was called by some the Latin ghetto. It was fifty dollars a month.
It was a railroad apartment, because it was laid out in a line, a main room, a kitchen with a bath tub on one side, and in the back, the bathroom. When I slept on the floor at night, a rat used to crawl out of a hole in the floor and, I don't know, feel sorry for me, I guess. I had a pet cat with stripes who showed up one day but then just as fast, "Tiger" disappeared after I tried to give him a bath. The hallway and stairs, eight flights down, looked like a war zone. Over the years, frequent fires meant that the department repeatedly came roaring in, chopped holes in the walls, hosed down the flames and then left. There were charred remains, blackened steel bars and broken glass littering the stairways and brandishing out of breeches in the walls.
When it rained, the water would flood down the steps from the broken skylight and mix with the human defecation and the garbage left by the bums who often slept there. The torrents looked like little waterfalls weeping in the early seventies. Sometimes you could hear a junkie on the rooftop, junkie heaven, screaming from an overdose of heroin.
Then it happened. I didn't know it was a death trap or I wouldn't have felt so bad. It was an elevated highway over Brooklyn, where the oil and exhaust of ten or twenty rush hours would build up before a big storm lifted the mix from the textures of the tar and blend with the hydroplane potential to take many a life.
I went through the area during one of those big summer city storms going forty five. I thought I was safe. When I hit the rail the whole vehicle lifted off the road. In those days you only wore a lap belt. I'm glad I had mine on. Though it might not have made much difference if the cab went over the edge. It almost did. That would have been fifty, more or less, yards down to the unsuspecting brownstones below.
I got soaked in the storm waiting for help and that's when I noticed the bald tires on the cab the company gave me to drive that night. First on the scene was the cop who fined me for driving without a license. When I found the license and told him, he said it was too late since he'd already written the ticket. The cab company sent a tow truck that broke down on the way in. I was fired.
Then the psychological thing began to set in. Plus there I was in a bad environment for psychological hygiene anyway. The guy next door let me move in and share the rent at his place. Only he hadn't paid the rent in months. He was gone, sitting there all-day-every-day, on a big ancient worn-out over-stuffed chair with arms, surrounded by vinyl thirty-three and a third long playing rock albums wearing a pair of humongous head-sets. The place had bed bugs.
Air referred me to one of his friends who worked in mid-town as a commercial artist with a firm that made window dressing displays for department stores throughout the country. I got a job there. I was handed a black felt-tip, a yard stick and some sheets of foam core and was told to go to it. After a while, it occurred to me that I could do it faster freehand. I was fired.
I realized why so many were staying marooned in that ghetto. I studied them as they leaned on pillows out of their windows along the street as bongo beats wafted through the summer air along the busy street. I walked to the Holland Tunnel, stuck out my thumb and visited my mother in Washington, D.C. There I saw Richard again, the son of my mother's friend, Helen. Richard had a friend also named Richard who let me stay at his place in New York. It was a nice apartment near Washington Square (that's actually in New York City, where the first president, Washington, served in that City before the presidents began to reside in Washington D.C., also named after George Washington).
I finally started to paint again. One of my best. It was from a picture I got from a magazine of a Russian peasant plowing a field with a horse. Richard bought it. Well, things were going okay until one of the bed bugs hitched on some of my clothes and got Richard's friend Richard.
Then I was looking for a place again. By that time the first Richard had gotten an apartment and was going to be out of town for a few months, so he let me stay at his place. That's where I painted the "Four Seasons" which I also call "Sunlight". Once again, I found a food co-op but they were more expensive. The month's rations cost $25 this time. So that was the beginning of what I call my "Late Manhattan Period" of art work, and by then I was starting to wonder if I was some sort of guerilla artist, having to dash off to some new place to be able to crank out a couple of pieces of artwork before something or other started to come down on me like a ton of bricks.
Note : At the time I wrote this, I had mistakenly said "Four Planets" instead of "Four Seasons". So I took out the Four Planets painting and put in the Four Seasons painting you should see above.
At the time (and most of the time, actually) I was under a lot of stress to say the least. Long story, no space for it here. Anyway, some visitors may have "hit" (what atrocious tripe they come up with in internet jargon! What's wrong with "selected"?) this page looking for the painting "Four Planets", so click here to visit Four Planets.
All good things come to an end and Richard got back. So I talked with my friend Jerry, an old classmate from the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street, where I had gone to school during my Grenwich Village Period before I went into the army. Jerry had gotten into sculpture and finished school, then began to look for a loft like Air had done. He found a guy that had bought an old bum's flop house and offered one of the lofts to Jerry if he would fix it up which he did at considerable effort and expense. Then the guy kicked him out. Jerry had taken him for his word and the word was worthless. There was nothing on paper. Then he had found this other place but had suffered and suffered the anguish of the previous loss and that made poor Jerry a temperamental roommate.
For a while things went really well and that's where I did some huge canvasses most of which got thrown away by the proprietor of a flea market on the Outer Banks in North Carolina when I lived there. That's a long story in itself.
I've lost a lot of artwork on the way. In fact, most of it. The few shreds that remain I have because my poor mother took good care of them during the twenty years or so I found myself traveling the world. One of the canvasses I painted while at Jerry's loft I still have. "Nautilus Planet". That's classified in my Staten Island Period because I finished it in a commune in Staten Island where I finally ended up because I was getting nowhere at Jerry's place. The arguments got worse and worse.
Nautilus Planet
The old Staten Island house had so many sharing the rent that it was cheap enough.
While at Jerry's I got hired by another cab company in Queens. I think it was Ann's Cab Company. I guess it was named after the owner's wife.
Which finally brings us to why I wrote this article in the first place. It was shortly after I had started driving again, finally convinced trying to become a successful abstract expressionist in post 60's New York City was a dream-on scenario.
Andy Warhol was standing somewhere around third avenue and twelfth street in the middle of the intersection. Not just in the middle of the road but in the middle of two roads. He was dressed in total purple and it appeared to be shining silk. I decided I'd better be a part of the spontaneity as I was an artist, too. So we could make this into a work of art.
Nobody saw. It must have been about two in the morning. He stood there and in a statuesque way, raised his entire right arm and pointed his finger in the air in the classic cab hailing pose I used to call the "Statue of Liberty". Cab driving had not been kind to me. It was work, but it had kept me from painting. I guess Andy may have sensed my anguish because what unfolded was something he may have been trying to do from soup can paintings to silver balloons in a closed room. Reversing the dead-end trend of a money-mad cultureless shallow so-called "mass culture" living death by trying to rub the art public's noses in it. Whether he knew it or not, or whether he knew I knew it or not, we were about to turn the horror of cab driving taking all my painting time into an actual work of art using the sociological nightmare of the late 20th century city as an art medium. At least that's how I see it, so if nothing else was accomplished, at least that was.
I drove in a stiff, dignified fashion as if I were a chauffeur for a personal Rolls Royce. I stopped silently and deftly in the middle of the intersection as soon as the light changed and Warhol got in. I drove him to a bar on the lower West Side, the West Village, and he paid his fare and gave a tip.
What did we say in the dozen or so minutes he rode in my cab that pre-dawn morning? Guess what? I forgot. But somehow it kept me going as I now realize in a certain strange sort of way. We had participated in a work of Pop art which I call "The Fare". It was what we would call in those days a "happening". I contributed in the pop making of a self portrait of Andy Warhol.
Okay. You might ask what good is that. After all, it's a work of art nobody sees, right? Wrong. You just saw it. In your imagination as you read this article.
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used as the background,
"Image137pastel1".
Click here to return to the weblog, "The Day I Waved Back at Queen Elizabeth the Second"
Click to go to any of the following:
Click here to return to the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold article
Click here to return to the Nautilus Planet article
The Notorious White Pass Trail of Dead Horses...
He stood there and in a statuesque way, raised his entire right arm and pointed his finger in the air in the classic cab hailing pose I used to call the "Statue of Liberty".
Copyright © 2003 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
...It was a dark, hot summer night. I was combing through lower Manhattan in my cab towards the latter half of my shift. Maybe sometime around two in the morning. Someone was just standing there in the middle of an intersection, I could see the figure a couple of blocks away. Standing there in a solid shiny purple silk suit waiting calmly, not flinching an inch. There he was, old Soup Cans himself, Andy Warhol...