December 18 – but, back in 1974.
From Peter Hujar’s Day (Magic Hour Press) by Linda Rosenkrantz
“On December 18, 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz asked her friend Peter Hujar to write down everything he did one day. Hujar met Rosenkrantz at her apartment on 94th street the following day where she asked him about it in detail. She tape-recorded their conversation and this book is a full transcript of that exchange..”
The day included a visit to Allen in his East 10th Street apartment.
Hujar recalls:
“I don’t know what I expected of Allen Ginsberg’s apartment, but it was really the most run-down tenement, with tenement furniture, linoleum, a few sort of Indian things, a mattress on the floor, a poster of Bob Dylan on the wall, the Rolling Stones. Oh, there were some guitars around. There’s also a girl, with a very New York accent, about twenty-two.
LR: Just sitting around?
PH: No, they were addressing Christmas cards. Allen was on the phone. I don’t know if she lived with them or what I think they were somehow involved. I also had the feeling that Allen actually lives more in the country and Peter (Orlovsky) lives there with this girl.
That was my guess. I looked around for women’s things…I saw a bottle of silver blue-grey nail polish on a bookshelf, but I didn’t think that was enough of a clue. ‘Cause it looked somehow too butch. I could imagine them painting the electric guitar with it. Then she went into the kitchen and started frying an egg and it was just the most awful burning grease, I mean it really smelled tenement. And then she said “your eggs are ready.””
(The woman in Allen’s apartment was indeed Peter’s girlfriend, the legendary guitarist, Denise Mercedes, who would later form the seminal NYC punk band The Stimulators and joined Allen & Peter on the Rolling Thunder revue. The tenement environment evokes typical Ginsberg living-quarters)
For more on Peter Hujar – see here and here and here