Chapter 2



Since money was scarce, "Lady" and I often ate unpopular organ meats such as kidney, 

liver, and heart. These items sold at very low prices and sometimes were given away. I 

cooked mine, she ate hers raw. I learned to make a mean kidney stew, liver and onions either 

fried or baked. I hung a salami on the wall where the mice couldn'5t get it and cooked a 

cheap family recipe of salami and eggs.



Before leaving Bill's and moving into my loft, I took up with a young dark-skinned 

Jamaican single mother who was also named Max, short for Maxine. She loved jazz and 

was a very happy person. She lived next door to Bill in the eastside tenement on A Street. 

So we became the "two Maxes." Max was a great help to me in building my loft. She was 

really quite a wonderful person. She was my helper in my carpentry adventures, she kept 

my spirits up and she made me laugh, often at times when I wanted to cry. However, after I 

moved into my loft, we gradually grew apart.



Soon after moving in I bought a small, wind-up, inexpensive 16mm movie camera and 

began filming inside my studio and outside on the Bowery corner that I lived on. I used 

black-and-white tri-x grainy film. I filmed all shots handheld. I purchased a used 16mm 

projector and used a white sheet to project the film on. I bought some rudimentary editing 

equipment and began splicing together an experimental documentary which I called "Inside 

Outside."



That winter I was wearing a WWII heavy wool army overcoat which my good friend 

Charlie Mastropoalo had given me. I took it to a tailor and had it cut off at fingertip length. 

It was unique and handsomely stylish. At least I thought so. I noticed that a lot of the wino 

vets on the street below also wore the same overcoat, but in its original form and quite the 

worse for wear, being slept in on the street, dirty, torn and wrinkled. The contrast was 

starkly unavoidable. These poor wretches living on the Bowery on small pensions for their 

service to their country were all alcoholics who drank all day to conquer their demons, while 

I, living on a very small income, was enjoying a completely different lifestyle. I smoked a 

little pot, they drank booze.



The police at that time were being kept so busy with violent crimes that they had no time to 

enforce the archaic drug laws. People were shooting up in doorways. Pot was very low on 

the list of serious crime. Nobody really cared.



 As I have said before, I owned a VW bus, but most of my driving was moving my VW 

from one side of Houston Street to the other to avoid parking tickets. It was necessary to get 

up early every morning to move from the east side of the street to the west side and then in the 

late afternoon move it back to the east side. The other driving was mostly on weekend trips 

to visit friends in the country. I had a lady friend who lived in Connecticut on several 

wooded acres. I did some color filming in the fall at her place. I knew a nearly blind painter 

who lived with his wife and children in a remodeled church in upstate New York. He had 

tunnel vision and was legally blind but did marvelous surrealist paintings. His place was a 

great spot to go in the winter. I was given a written introduction to him by my dear friend 

John Nevin who lived in Mexico in the tiny village of Marfil, Guanajuato. John is a brilliant 

landscape and portrait artist. He was my next-door neighbor in Marfil where we both had 

studios. John was seldom without a cigarette. Now he has emphysema. I pray he is still 

alive. We were very close. We still correspond. Now, today, after thinking about writing 

John for a few weeks, but somehow never finding time for it, I received a letter from his 

daughter Joyce, telling me that he died on New Years Eve. I find this news devastating. John 

was as close to a big brother as I ever had, being myself an only child. So we're going to 

have to take a little side trip here, while I reminisce about my old friend.



John Nevin was born and raised on a farm in Rhode Island. Early on he became fascinated 

with art and horses. As a young man he became a rodeo rider and rodeoed all over the 

States, finally ending up in Madison Square Garden where he was thrown from a bull and 

seriously injured.



About this time World War II erupted and after recovering, John enlisted in the Air Force. 

He flew as a machine gunner on a B29 bomber, the biggest, highest flying bomber in the 

world at that time. 



John flew in the raids over Germany and related stories about his wartime experiences after 

we became close friends in Mexico. The B29 was not pressurized and the crew had to wear 

oxygen masks and sheepskin uniforms. John told me stories about what it was like to fly at 

high altitudes where it was extremely cold.



The B29 was not equipped with toilets. All it had was tubes to urinate through. According to 

John it was so cold that the piss froze as soon as it left your body and occasionally men had 

to be pried off the tubes.



Then the planes would have to lose altitude as they flew over the target in order to see what 

they were doing and hit their objectives. No smart bombs in those days. The sky was filled 

with anti-aircraft shells exploding on all sides and riddling the plane with holes and 

shrapnel. It was terrifying. They were sitting ducks. Crew men were horribly wounded. At 

the same time, Germany Messerschmidts were coming in from above on all sides trying to 

shoot the B29s down. 



Then, if still possible, the plane had to climb up to safety, back into the frigid cold and limp 

back to the home base in England. The B29 was a very sturdy plane, but the wounded 

crewmen would have to survive with only the most rudimentary medical assistance that the 

other crewmen, who weren't busy flying the plane or fighting off enemy fighter planes, 

could provide. The B29 had a nose gunner and a tail gunner who sat in cramped turrets in 

those spots on the plane and were especially vulnerable. The nose turret also housed the 

bombardier. John's post was amid ship on a side turret, but he was often called upon to man 

the other guns on the top turret or the turret on the other side if those crew members 

sustained injuries during the flight. Altogether a horrific experience on each and every 

flight. John felt especially fortunate not to have been killed or permanently injured. This 

experience made him a confirmed and dedicated pacifist.