My Dear Friend Denis...

Another old friend appeared to me over the weekend and it’s worth taking a breath and remembering Denis. Back in the early days, my roommate, Tom worked at Time Magazine as a researcher. Tom’s co-worker in research, Alex, was, like most of the people in my tale, another one whose life flew off the tracks in the early 70s. He was gay when gayness began to demand recognition. There was a huge undercurrent of gender-related activity in the air. Greenwich Village was a hub. The West side cowboy/biker scene was exploding. Discos and other all-night clubs were happening in Chelsea and throughout the city. As for me, I was still accumulating outlets and sources for my newly discovered career. This connection with Alex uncovered a whole new subcultural market that seemed absolutely perfect. My connections into the scene were all honest gentlemen who, by nature, were used to doing things in the shadows.

Sadly, as the 70s drew into the 80s, the scourge of AIDS and HIV ran rampant in the gay community. It was a horror show. Lots of people were just wasting away and incredibly, the politicians refused to help, blaming the sickness on a ‘lifestyle’ rather than an illness to be cured. It was a sad time and if you’ve never seen the movie Philadelphia or Dallas Buyers Club or any of the dozens of depictions of that time, you should take an hour or a day and try to understand what it’s like to be castigated and cast out for being terminally sick. Bottom line, it wasn’t all fun and games in the New York City underworld in the 70s. People were scared out of their wits. Nobody was sure of anything except people were dying and it was obviously an infectious disease. Once people realized it was possibly blood-borne, things got out of hand quickly. Everybody felt vulnerable, whether they were gay or not. Needles were known to carry a risk. A guy I knew who had a place in the meat-packing district around 14th Street and 8th Avenue was afraid to open his windows. He believed that a mosquito bite could carry the HIV disease if the mosquito had bitten a person who was positive for the virus. And who was going to tell him to open his windows? Me? No way! The music/art/theatre scene was, as it always had been, a hub of homosexuality and people were dropping like flies. Meantime, it was hard to ignore the thought that this disease was linked to our drug-fueled, acid-laced, Be Here Now, wave of baby boomer culture.

There was no cure except complete abstinence and for many people, that was not an easy option.

Anyway, via my relationship with Tom and then Alex... and several others, I found myself interacting with a very smooth honest guy who owned a loft on 23rd Street down the block from the Chelsea Hotel. This was Denis, who was a unique cog in the invisible machine. He was always around, seemed to be connected to everyone I knew or wanted to know, and who was, in his own right, a very smart dude. He came from a card-carrying Mayflower-descendant family and was apparently the black sheep of the family due to his sexual proclivities and perhaps some other frowned-upon behaviors. I mean, here was a guy whose grandfather held the patent on the modern fire hydrant, whose uncles, John & Washington Roebling, designed the Brooklyn fucking Bridge. Denis was a story unto himself, both smart, well-read, and enterprising.

One day, in the late winter of 1969, Denis is sitting around with his friend Stan, and they pick up the Times and read an article about how the United Nations was holding some kind of conference to promote coffee in the United States. Denis was a Princeton guy and his complete package included a very smooth delivery. So he spends a day, puts together a presentation and heads up to the United Nations to propose a Manhattan club that will only serve coffee products. Six weeks later, Denis gets a grant of $250,000 to build the club and, from what I heard, that’s how the Electric Circus nightclub was born. They opened the doors and the first weekend took in $100,000 and the rest is history. Eventually the venture went public and imploded after a few disastrous openings, most notably in Toronto, but the seed of creation was sown right there in Denis’s loft on 23rd Street.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1356&dat=19690430&id=f4ZPAAAAIBAJ&sjid=cAUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7364,9564346&hl=en

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19690415&id=zE0aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MygEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2691,4694883&hl=en

http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2013/04/recollections-of-electric-circus-if-you.html

The Electric Circus was only one of dozens of ventures that came out of that loft. Denis was a principle in a Redwood Furniture deal, partner in numerous SRO hotel deals, had fantastic pot connections on both coasts, and never, for one New York second, did anything unethical or did not stand up to any promise he ever made. Eventually that became funny after I got popped owing him dough and he actually had the balls to take a tax deduction on it. (But, yes, that’s another entire story).

Incidentally, Denis bought that three story loft building for about $30,000 in the late 60s and the last I heard he had turned down an offer for about $3,000,000. Unfortunately, after he bought the loft, he bought the farm when he developed some terminal form of abdominal malignancy (may or may not have been HIV-related) and passed away around Y2K. Denis was one beautiful guy. I still miss him.