Read Online POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett - Free Book Online

sensation and everything, he asked me for a free copy of my second book. I said, ‘But you’re
rich
now—you can afford to
buy
it!’ And he said, ‘But I only get paid quarterly.’”
    (Taylor confessed to me a couple of years later, “The minute I heard Bob Dylan with his guitar, I thought, ‘That’s it, that’s what’s coming in, the poets have
had
it.’”)
    When he was twenty-two, Taylor had quit his job as a broker at Merrill Lynch in Detroit. I wondered what Taylor had been doing at a job like that in the first place. “Well, my father, Harry Mead, was the political boss of Michigan,” he explained. “He was one of Roosevelt’s favorites, and his official title was Wayne County Democratic Chairman, but he was also head of the Liquor Control Commission and the WPA in the Detroit area.He’d made the resident partner of Merrill Lynch in Detroit the state treasurer, and so the treasurer felt obligated to give Harry Mead’s son a job.” Taylor spent most of his time there studying graphs on how to beat the market. “I finally figured out a system,” he said, “and it really spooked the boys at Merrill Lynch.” I asked him what kind of a system. “I could have made a fortune,” he said. “I told my father about it. The only trouble was he didn’t get around to buying the stock I’d recommended until after the point when I would have already
sold
it! And
that
,” Taylor said dryly, “was the only opportunity my father ever gave me to prove myself.”
    I couldn’t imagine Taylor poring over stock market graphs and charts, but then, I couldn’t imagine him driving, either, and there he was, at the wheel.
    When Taylor left his stockbroker job in Detroit, he had just fifty dollars in his pocket. “Kerouac’s
On the Road
put me on the road,” he said, “and Allen’s
Howl
, which had just come out, had a big effect on me.”
    Taylor was in San Francisco in ’56 when the beat poetry scene got going. One day he stood up on a bar and over the noise all the drunks were making, started screaming some poems he’d written. Ron Rice saw that scene and began following him around, filming him with black and white war surplus film stock.
    â€œRon is such a devil.” Taylor smiled (Ron was still alive at this point; he didn’t die until a year or so later). “Stealing his girl friends’ support checks, running off with all the theater receipts, chasing people down the street with his camera trying to film them—and everybody loves him. He took a film course once at the Cooper Union and then he made a film of people ice skating. Then together we made
The Flower Thief
. I had to fight himall the way to get him not to put a blue wash on it. I told him, ‘Look, Ron, in a few years that kind of thing will be
over
.’”
    After San Francisco, Taylor came east and read at coffee shops like the Epitome in the Village. He’d hitched crosscountry five times by then, and that’s how he knew all about the truck stops.
    I told him, fine, he could pick out the next place we stopped for dinner. After directing Wynn on lefts and rights for a few miles, he steered us into a big truck stop. We sat in a booth over on the side—and were, in fact, a sideshow. I don’t know what it was, exactly, about the way we looked, but the alien alert was on; people were turning to look at the “freaks.” I thought we looked normal enough—our clothes were pretty conventional—but it was obviously
something
, because
everybody
was staring. One by one they came up to us, all friendly and smiling, but studying us—beautiful blond kids, girls in ponytails and ironed blouses, boys in crew cuts or long, slicked-back farmer cuts—and they all said, “Where you from?” When we told them New York, they stared more, wanting—they