Free Caveat Emptor by Ken Perenyi Page A

news. Tony couldn’t stand the quiet life in the country. He and Barbara weren’t getting along, and word was that he was back in New York City, looking for a place of his own.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Union Square
    T ony found a loft at 864 Broadway, just off Union Square. It was half a block from Andy Warhol’s building, two blocks away from Max’s Kansas City, and a short walk from my place on Fifth Avenue.
    The Psychedelic Sixties were over and the hippies were disappearing. There were no more be-ins, and Tompkins Square Park, the spiritual center of the counterculture, had become a haunt for drug addicts and bums. The building that had once housed the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place was a drug rehab.
    It was a sobering time. Edie Sedgwick had OD’d in California and was, indeed, “Eight Miles High.” Poor Andrea Feldman went “flying” one last time, committing suicide by jumping out of an apartment window on Fifth Avenue. Tom was still living at the Castle as a recluse. The property had been sold and was now scheduled for demolition in order to build another high-rise. He was determined to stay until they drove up the road with the wrecking ball. And Don Rubow, the old beatnik who’d first invited me into the Castle and subsequently changed my life, was also dead. His sorry end was one of the last stories Tom told me before I moved to the city. As he explained it, “Don was running like a madman from job to job trying to keep food on the table for his wife and four kids in a loft on Canal Street, when his heart just exploded one day!”
    When I’d first met Tom and Tony at seventeen, I hadn’t cared about the future. To be part of their world was too exciting for me to pass up, even if I had burned my bridges behind me, but those few years changed everything. The Revolution was a bust, I was temperamentally unemployable, and by 1972 the future had arrived.
    Reality for Tony and me wore a hard and brutal face. The economy was in a severe recession, and New York City was hit hard. Life was becoming a fight for survival in which we were willing to resort to more and more desperate measures. My plan was to struggle through this situation with the only means at my disposal, namely art. Tony simply refused to work in any way, shape, or form. Instead, he spent his time at Max’s or hanging out in bars in Brooklyn with his hoodlum friends, figuring out their next score.
    Nevertheless, I was glad Tony was back in New York and back to his old routine. As long as I’d known him, he’d sleep until two in the afternoon, get up, pull himself together for the next couple of hours, and by four he’d be ready to go out to a café. Then he’d return at seven, lounge around for a while before hitting the bars at ten, stagger back home at three, and do the same thing all over again the next day.
    Aside from a few extra pounds, Tony’s looks and charm hadn’t faded a bit. He moved in the highest circles of the contemporary art world and was invited to every party and gallery opening in SoHo. But ever since he’d cleaned out the museum in Lake George, his behavior had grown increasingly frightening.
    Letting him into your home could be a disaster. He would be perfectly comfortable, sunk in a sofa, looking quite harmless. You could leave the room for moment and not give it a thought, return, and find him exactly as you’d left him, never realizing that the minute you were gone, he had rifled through every drawer and desktop and relieved them of any credit cards or checkbooks.
    His victims were legion, and no one was immune: friends, family, or business acquaintances. He expected his victims not to take it personally. In fact, he often invited them for dinner or drinks, sometimes paying with his guest’s own stolen credit cards. He seemed to possess—and I’ve heard others say this as well—almost a sixth sense telling him exactly where a