591 Broadway

Boundaries

68

AMOS POE A few months after that scene at the Mudd Club I had an open screening of a film at Broadway and Twelfth Street. It was six flights of stairs straight up. You could look down at a half mile of stairs. The screening started at eight o’clock. It was jammed to the rafters. It was like $3 to get in. The guy (Rafik) that ran it and I were counting the money. I heard this loud clomping. It was Sarah climbing the stairs. Clomp-clomp-clomp. I was still pissed off from her using me to make her boyfriend jealous. “Sorry”, I said when she got to the top of the stairs. “No more tickets.” So she started clomping back down the stairs. I felt bad, so I called after her. “Hey, a bunch of us are heading over to the Mickey’s later, maybe you want to join us?” Later on that night, she was there. We started talking and somehow we ended up going home together to her place. It was a loft at 591 Broadway, this 10,000-square-foot loft. This loft was like a whole city block. I was just blown away. I saw her art, a newspaper series. I was blown away. She not only had beauty, she had brains too. Smitten.

SARAH It ran from Broadway to Mercer and was 6,000 square feet. And we paid $550 a month rent. I had a 2,000-square-foot studio, and so did Joseph. And we had a 2,000-square-foot living area in between.

AMOS POE She was leaving the next week to meet Joseph in Italy. She went and we corresponded over the summer. When she got back in the fall we started going out surreptitiously, and it went on like that. The next summer, 1980, she decided not to go to Italy. She was going to stay in New York for the first time in ten years. I lived in the loft and hung out with her all summer. When Joseph came back in the fall I moved back to my own apartment. But now we were a couple. The next summer, in 1981, Joseph went to Italy again. I moved into the loft again. This time, I decided not to move out. And the three of us lived there. Joseph had the front with all the windows and Sarah and I had the back. Joseph and I were friends. Sarah would cook for both of us.

GLENN O’BRIEN Joseph was a terrible boyfriend. He was such a womanizer. I don’t know if they ever discussed the boundaries of their relationship, but Joseph wasn’t very discreet. But then when she took up with Amos, I guess the idea was that it was her loft, too—so Amos could stay there. That was really an awkward and uncomfortable situation. At one point, Amos was living in a closet in that big loft. There was a really small room. It was basically a closet, and that was Amos’ room.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH Joseph was hot, hot, hot in the Conceptual Art world. The loft was huge and the walls were spray-painted white like a gallery. The wood floors re-finished regularly. No door on the bathroom—no respectable loft had that. There was a black rabbit that roamed around. Amos came from the underground film world. When Sarah stayed at Amos’ in the East Village, she took candles because inevitably Con Ed had shut the electricity off.

SARAH For a while, it was sort of complicated. Joseph and I were very, very fond of each of each other and very committed to each other as working artists, but I was beginning to be romantically involved with Amos. Eventually I had to move out, and Amos and I got a loft together on Great Jones Street.

Sarah and Amos on the roof, 591 Broadway.

69