Read Online I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons - Free Book Online Page B

friends painted bits of driftwood, mainly, in psychedelic colors, really bright. With all this high-intensity speed going on, they were painting away in the most minute little detail,” says the British author and sixties counterculture figure Barry Miles. “Allen Ginsberg took Norman Mailer there because it was just amazing to see.” In this drab, run-down part of the Lower East Side, it looked like somebody had bombed a rainbow. Trocchi named these artworks “futiques”—antiques of the future. It’s easy to see why Leonard was drawn to Trocchi.
    In the spring of 1961, still a cheerleader for heroin, Trocchi gave some to a sixteen-year-old girl. “He wasn’t a dealer; he had this absurd, fairly sick thing that he just loved turning people on to smack,” explains Miles, “but it was a capital offense in New York.” Trocchi was arrested. Facing the possibility of the electric chair, or at least a very long prison term, he went on the run. Nancy Bacal, whom Leonard introduced to Trocchi when she was making a program for CBC about drug use in London, says, “Alex was a strange, brilliant, one-of-a-kind person. Leonard was extremely fond of him.” Evidently so. Leonard arranged to meet Trocchi at the Canadian border, then took him to Montreal and put him up in his apartment. The Scotsman did not like to visit empty-handed; he brought some opium with him and set to cooking it up on Leonard’s stove. When he was done, he handed Leonard the pan with the leftovers. Apparently he left a little too much. When they set off on foot to find a place to eat, Leonard collapsed as they crossed Saint Catherine Street. He had gone blind. Trocchi dragged him out of the way of the passing cars. They sat together on the curb until Leonard came round. He seemed none the worse for wear. For the next four days Leonard played host to Trocchi until someone—some say George Plimpton, others Norman Mailer—came up with false papers for Trocchi to travel by ship from Montreal to Scotland. Alighting in Aberdeen, Trocchi made his way to London, where he registered as a heroin addict with the National Health Service and obtained his drug legally.
    In his poem “Alexander Trocchi, Public Junkie, Priez Pour Nous,” which would appear in Leonard’s third book of poetry, Flowers for Hitler, Leonard wrote of the outlaw he helped rescue,
    Â Â Â Â  Who is purer
    Â Â Â Â  more simple than you?  . . .
    Â Â Â Â  I’m apt to loaf
    Â Â Â Â  in a coma of newspapers . . .
    Â Â Â Â  I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada. . . .
    Â Â Â Â  You are at work
    Â Â Â Â  in the bathrooms of the city
    Â Â Â Â  changing the Law . . .
    Â Â Â Â  Your purity drives me to work.
    Â Â Â Â  I must get back to lust and microscopes
    T he Spice-Box of Earth, despite its excellence and acclaim, failed to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. According to Irving Layton, this hurt Leonard; whatever else might not work out the way he might like, Leonard could at least rely on being the darling of the Canadian poetry world. Then the Canada Council came through like the cavalry with a grant of $1,000. In August 1961, Leonard was back in Greece, writing.
    â€œIt was a good place to work,” says Mort Rosengarten, who stayed with Leonard on Hydra for two months. “It was very special—no electricity, no telephone, no water. It was beautiful and, back then, very inexpensive, so it was the best place for him to be to write. We had a nice routine. We would go to sleep about three in the morning but we’d get up very early, six A.M ., and work till noon. I started drawing—in fact the first time I really started drawing was there; I’d studied sculpture but I’d never drawn or painted—and he also got me a bag of plaster so I made some sculptures. At noon