Smiley’s Dice on Manhattan Part Four

Smiley’s Dice Adventures in Livingness

 By: Louellen Smiley   The throw of the dice this week falls on the last segment of Manhattan.  I had just left the Copafest and was in a cab, tailgating a Saturday night rush through Central Park. I went to a wedding in 1984 at Tavern on the Green. It was my sister’s wedding.  The roll of images spliced past like a silent movie  fast forward. The kind you cannot submarine, they float to the surface involuntarily, and you submit squirming.  The mood switched to the Copa, and to this one conversation, a long storied admission between women who trust one another. I don’t know why June confided in me. Just as I don’t know why later that night I would confide in Jerry.  June was a dancer at the Copa.  She met a  young promising singer there. She fell in love with him, and he with her. Their relationship lasted five years. It continued in the heart for years after that, and still today June is in love with the singer.  I was slumped into that kind of love mood, mesmerized by June’s beauty and  resemblance to the other woman who married the young singer. Then  the cab emptied me onto the Westside, and I was at Jerry Schatzberg’s  front door  ringing his bell.     Jerry was introduced to me through the art gallery business.  We exhibited his photographs of Jimi Hendrix, and corresponded by way of business. The first email I sent him was embedded with personal information I did not share with the other photographers.   It was instinctual guidance that enabled me to write to Jerry in a way that accentuated kinship.  The exhibition opened and closed.  His photographs were still in the main salon, and I looked at them from every angel. You get to know someone by their photographs. If you look at them, study them, and muse their moment, you will see the photographer taking it. I tried to imagine Jerry shooting “Reflection,”  more than the other photographs.  It was the most amazing shot of Jimi combing his hair in his dressing room.  He wore a double breasted  wool military jacket and his hair was fluffed out afrocentric vogue. He was smiling, but there was no visible smile. Jerry shot from behind, so you see the reflection of Jimi in the mirror, the way Jimi saw himself in the mirror.  But of course you don’t. It is the supreme temptation to imagine you can get inside his head.  I did in that photo. That is why I decided to ask Jerry to have dinner with me when I was in New York, and why I was now standing at his front door.              He answered and we crossed the first threshold quickly, and effortlessly. I was seated at his desk,  looking at his Bob Dylan portfolio on his computer. The Blonde on Blonde album cover he shot flashed, and I mumbled wow several times. Then the photos he took of Bob in his studio appeared, and I saw a Dylan that caused me to feel the hunger in my belly even more.  I watched the flash images, and intermittently glanced at the room. His walls were backdrops to films he directed, and the rugs were just shelves for the stacks of books he had to no room to shelve. I noticed Nelson Algren on a stack.  I imagined Jerry had more authors that I loved.     “ We should go, your hungry, he said.  I was starving; it was an inconvenient time to allow my hunger to overpower my fascination with seeing a Dylan only a very few had seen. We were walking down 85^th street to an Italian restaurant. Jerry walked New York, not the other way around. He stopped about midway of the block in front of a laundry. He chuckled and told me a synopsis of a story he was working on, and then I told him about Mimi on the plane, and how I felt she could develop into a story. Then we  walked at the same pace. I wasn’t lagging, or feigning my confidence.      “Oh I love this room,” I said as we entered the restaurant. Everyone looked up without hesitation as they do in New York.  I was flush with an absence of sight, when you just look straight through everything.   The host was waiting to take my order so Jerry asked me what I wanted to drink.I ordered a glass of wine, and Jerry said he’d pass because he was working.   “What are you working on?” “Three scripts, ones about…. And his voice trotted away without accentuation or affectation.  I told him about my works in progress and we continued talking all through the appetizers, dinner, and coffee. Then I was back in the cab and riding though Central Park. This time without the rollback images of my sister, my head was splitting with ten thousand waves of New York. The pavement raced by and I thought of Nelson Algren’s descriptions of New York, and Stieglitz’s images and I wanted to get out and dance  but instead I went back to the Chelsea Hotel.   I talked to the valet, swirled through the hotel, the bar next door, and went back to the blue room and looked out the window.   I’m insatiably romantic about New York because I have never lived there.   I fell asleep sitting up staring out that window, feeling a sliver of  myself in the scenery. Any dice to throw Email FolliesLs@aol.com

“Photography is a language of stories. The stories you choose for your home or office are an interpretation of what is in your heart.” LS
GALLERY LOULOU
20th Century Black & White Photography
The Royals & The Rebels
343 E. Palace Avenue
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Ph: 505-989-3426 Fax: 505-982-2350
loulou@galleryloulou.com www.galleryloulou.com
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 11:00 am – 5: 00 pm OR BY APPOINTMENT