HARVEY COHEN: “Amphetamine is very much an overachiever’s type of chemical. Methedrine rolls back the stone from the mouth of the cave. It is the most profound of all drugs, the most unexplored and the freakiest. It can be so many things; there’s always a place to go behind methedrine that you’ve never been before.”
MARY WORONOV: “The power, the energy. Oh, you were like God, so thrilled with yourself that you could spend 24 hours hearing yourself talk. Of course, someone not on amphetamine might find everything coming out of your mouth extremely stupid, but who the fuck cared? You could think more and the rush was like sexual orgasm. It was about being bigger, better, stronger, smarter, and quicker.”
MARTIN TORGOFF: “There was a certain high-camp theatricality about the A men, a sense that every minute of their lives was the premiere of some great opera or Hollywood movie in which they were the glorious stars.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “These characters, who sound as if they had woken up in a novel by Genet or Burroughs and crept off its pages, were talented misfits, most of them gay, who shared two important characteristics: they embodied a camp sensibility, marked by a spirit of theatrical extravagance, outrage, and excess; and they lived on speed.”
DANNY FIELDS: “The methamphetamine crowd of great geniuses. I was always terrified of Ondine, because he was so fabulous. I would stare at him, then he would start screaming ‘Who’s that person staring at me,’ and he would point and I would just want to die. If you can imagine Ondine in an amphetamine rage, pointing across the bar, screaming ‘Who’s that person!’”
MARY WORONOV: “Ondine was different, filled with opposites, he carried chaos around with him like a pet. People loved him and feared him, calling him both decadent and moral. His profile looked like it should have been on the back of a Roman coin, but instead it was surrounded by ruin: restless black hair and clothes that were ill fitting, borrowed, and thrown on a body that looked powerful but off balance.”
BILLY NAME: “Andy could be considered an angel, but Ondine was definitely an archangel.”
MARTIN TORGOFF: “Daybreak was the trickiest time of all when you were crashing. They called it the Dawn Patrol, when they would find themselves caught outdoors and the morning sun would send them scurrying for cover, pasty faced and cowering in doorways down on the Lower East Side. The verbal acrobatics and comic bitchiness that always seemed to animate conversation could suddenly erupt into the most searing cruelties. With the clubs closed and the parties long over, this vicious, amphetamine-fueled abuse of each other was a strange but compelling form of entertainment for them where there was really no place else to go, when there was nothing left to do but seek refuge in an early-morning coffee shop as far away as possible from the rush-hour throngs on their way to work, whose very existence seemed a brutal assault to their senses.”
MARY WORONOV: “It was so much fun, nobody ever went to sleep. I used to go back to my house in Brooklyn and drop into my childhood bed and go to sleep for a little while and go right back. Some of the A men did not sleep at all – they would die, they would go crazy. But it was unbelievable, the energy. Every time it started to flag, Ondine just dove for it – he just never, ever stopped! He was this very special person with an enormous generosity and talent but also clearly trying to destroy himself. It was like the A men were intentionally trying to burn themselves out. Nobody wanted to see old age – we thought it was stupid.”
MARY WORONOV: “Ondine was like The Cyclone – he thrilled and terrified me even though I knew I was in an amusement park. Rooms grew old when he left and after talking to him I couldn’t bear normal conversation.”
BILLY NAME: “Ondine was also a high-power intellect. He could be so cruel and didactic about what he thought was wrong or right, sometimes people just looked at this dragon monster and missed the whole point of the aesthetic dissertation he was giving them.”
ONDINE: “You can’t blame anybody for your drug use. You take drugs and you abuse yourself. Everybody abuses themselves. They say drugs destroy the mind. Drugs destroy the body. You have to have a mind to destroy.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Brigid Berlin was one of the few women among the Mole People. Brigid’s claim to fame, apart from her high-society heritage (her father was president of the Hearst Corporation) was that she was said to have squirted Nikita Khrushchev in the face with a water pistol when he visited the United Nations in 1960. She was known as ‘the Duchess’ or ‘the Doctor’ because, she boasted, she would give anyone who asked for it a poke of amphetamine through the seat of their pants. She shot speed several times a day, gorged on food, and was at times grotesquely overweight. She was also highly emotional, given to screaming tirades.”
BOB COLACELLO: “I used to joke with Brigid that she moved from the heart of darkness to the heart of darkness. She went from one evil empire to another.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Brigid is a conceptual thinker from a good family. Though she has moved to the wrong side of the tracks, her good breeding still shows.”
MARY WORONOV: “She shoplifted in only the best stores with the composure of a right-wing Republican and shot up in the finest restaurants, slamming the spike through her jeans, through her skin, and into her system as casually as if she were fixing her lipstick after dinner. Her greatest talent, however, was gossip; every drawer and shelf of her little room in the Washington Hotel was filled with tapes of conversations and polaroids.”
BRIGID BERLIN: “I got so thin, but it made me shop. Oh my God. My sister Richie and I would leave and beeline it to Bloomingdale’s, and we’d change our outfits as we went through the store. We’d just leave whatever we were wearing in the dressing room, but the new thing, charge it to our parents. It was charge to one, send to the other.”
ULTRA VIOLET: “Brigid Berlin was another easy character who claimed she never ate and one day I saw her at a drugstore having a triple ice cream soda; and she was so very upset that I saw her, so she claimed she was gaining weight just by being in the Factory, breathing the air, electric air.”
BRIGID BERLIN: “I thought it was very chic to sell drugs, to have my bicycle, and to wear my double-breasted blazer with gold buttons, and I had a secretary, Pixie, who I paid $30 a day, cash. And I lied! I told everyone in town that I had three pounds of heroin. I would make grass deals all over the telephone and didn’t have the grass to sell them. I just was trying to be a big shot. I would just ride around on by bike and stuff, and when Andy came in that day, I had a manila envelope full of pills. I wasn’t paranoid then. I didn’t know the meaning of the word paranoia. We never heard it in those years. I used to go to the Factory with a make-up thing, like a traveling bag, and I had a bottle of every different kind of pill there was. An Obetrol for those who like that, Tuinal for those who like Tuinal, Seconal, everything. They called me the Doctor, remember? That was when I was the Duchess. There was no paranoia.”
STEVEN WATSON: “Brigid spent long stretches of time in Rotten Rita’s apartment in the West Eighties. She knew that when she left the house, it could be days before she returned, so everything necessary for a stay was lodged into neat compartments in a large basket. It always contained a set of rapidograph pens with the finest points possible, a selection of Magic Markers, Winsor & Newton watercolors paints, trip books with blank pages, and a bottle of Majorska vodka.”
BILLY NAME: “He was the Mayor and she was the Duchess, an equal and a peer.”
ONDINE: “You stupid cock-sucker, if you die, you’re gonna die like a pig!”
ORION: “Oh Ondine, you’re so intuitive.”
ONDINE: “Isn’t she a fiend? God bless her, she’s fabulous.”
ALAN MIDGETTE: “When I arrived on set, Orion was already on pretty strong acid and then I took acid. I knew that this was one of those scenes that was going to be heavy duty. Orion said, ‘Darling, the stipulation was that I could do anything I wanted to do so just shut up and listen to the music.’ And we continued to look into each other’s eyes. Finally, Paul started saying to Orion, ‘It’s very boring. We gotta do something. You gotta have sex or something or fight with each other.’ Orion just looked at him and she said, ‘Oh, really?’ There was a machete on the wall and she picked it up and hit the chandelier and the glass went flying. I will never forget the image of Warhol standing behind the camera, whiter than he normally was, frozen behind the camera with little pieces of glass on his shoulders and he could not even speak, he was so terrified.”
ONDINE: “I’ve been talking to Orion. She thinks everybody’s against her.”
ROTTEN RITA: “Then she’s one of the sensible people in the world.”
STEVEN WATSON: “Ondine recalled first seeing her when he walked into Norman Billiardball’s apartment and noticed in the corner a beautiful woman in fantastic garb with a staff in her hand. Ondine had an immediate reaction: he insisted Norman throw her out. ‘I’ll beat the shit out of you,’ Ondine said. ‘Get the hell out of here.’ She took her staff to leave and said, ‘He’s divine, his violent.’ The voltage between the two of them was immediate; they had found an outrageous kindred spirit who shared wit, amphetamine, and extreme actions. Ondine said, ‘We used to make life so unbearable for people; it was just so wonderful.’ There was no question that Orion considered herself and the Mole People to be at the top of a hierarchy that was divorced from the real world. When Billy Name, playing with the idea of the demimonde, once observed that they were demigods, she drew herself up regally and exploded. ‘Demigods! We’re gods!’”
LOU REED: “A friend of mine was turned away from customs for witchcraft because she was covered with rat’s tales. That’s Orion, she was the female Ondine… a witch.”
MARY WORONOV: “Even Ondine hated Orion’s suicide altar, where she surrounded Jesus with pictures of famous suicides and anonymous kamikaze pilots. Ondine hated black magic and death worship, but he loved Orion. She carried a long black staff and a dark sense of power, and I had to admit she was beautiful and strange. When she was high, black feathers fell from her fingers like the shadows of stilettos. Ondine said one time she was so mad that all the feathers collected in the middle of the floor and turned into a big black crow that attacked him.”
MARY WORONOV: “Orion… some say she married an English lord, but Ondine said she had turned into a bird and sometimes she haunted him… Even in her disappeared state her powers remained; people told stories of apartments spontaneously combusting after she left them, and about how Silver George’s friend got meningitis when she looked at him.”
MARY WORONOV: “They were known as the Mole People. Mole because they were only seen at night, wearing sunglasses and a skin pallor that had to be the result of years of subterranean existence; Mole because they were known to be tunneling towards some greater insanity that no one but this inner circle was aware of.”
