THE RULES OF KLAUS photos by Anthony Scibelli / Story by Peter Nolan Smith

In 1978 Anthony Scibelli and I created a foto-roman of his photos and my story

The story was one of my detective poems and the cast featured the Eighth Wonder of the world, Klaus Nomi, Jon Waters Starlette, Cookie Mueller, Club 57 Impresario Andy Reese, A texas runaway, Clover Nolan, and me along with several other people whose names are locked in the past.

Scibelli's eternal black-and-white photos appeared at MoMA's CLUB 57 show 2017-2018.

MoMA's photo experts had digitally improved each image, which are classic reminders of a time when New York belonged to us and not them. We all know who them are.

18"X14" prints are available as are larger and smaller versions

To purchase the 18"X14" prints, please go to this URL

https://www.ebay.com/itm/THE-RULES-OF-KLAUS-featuring-fotos-of-Klaus-Nomi-and-Cookie-Mueller/164117217701

Thank You

Peter Nolan Smith

Emily D and Snow - A Homage

The storm's snow sweeps
Through the bare branches
Of the evergreen trees
Shivering outside my bedroom window
Wind-blown white flurries
Blight out not only the pine green,
But the gray, brown, black, white
Of the somber landscape
Of winter in New England

EVerything white and cold__
Swarms of snowflakes
Swirl
Before my window glaze with ice
A hand on the cold glass
A palm cold
On the cold glass
The touch of winter___
In a room
Warmed by a wood fire
Press my lips to the glass
Not your kiss

You far away
The cold kiss of winter

Here
With the warmth of summer
Months away
From my bedroom window__

ps winter is months away from this suny day. The last of September__

Expulsion from the Explorers Club

The last week of August was a rough week. I was expelled from the EC. Due to inadvertently showing three nude fotos from when I was rescuing horseshoe crabs under the Broad Channel Bridge. Truthfully I was surprised I lasted that mostly white male club as l9ng as I had. Sure, I had circumnavigated the world, lived in foreign lands, and fathered children in Thailand. The Ethics Committee listened to my statement accepting that no one should be shown naked photos, especially of an old traveler. That wasn't all. My work days in Montauk days have been reduced from three to two. Jewish holidays and a Nor'Easter. With five days off I've been writing more and cheating by using grammarly to correct my typos. I rewrote Fear of Heights about my urge to jump off condo balconies and mountain cliffs. the urge never goes completely away. Back in the 1980s Vonelli, my friend, had rented a small house behind Harrods in Kensington, London from a woman with a beautiful daughter, Carey Carey, who was going out with the oldest Bin Laden brother. Good fellow. Always showed up with champagne. Always vintage Anyway one evening the couple was accompanied by a crooked young man. Eric calmy explained that a year agobhe had thrown himself off Harrod's roof. But obviously hadn't died. His later second attempt was more successful. Writing this dragged me down, but the story had a happy ending__ Off to Montauk So back on June 2. I had A Train to the Broad Channel to view the annual arrival of the horseshoe crabs to breed with my friend Raoul. I had missed high tide. Plenty of the shelled creatures had been stranded high on the sand. There wasn't a soul in sight. Just Raoul and I and the horseshoe crabs. I rescued a number. It was a warm sunny day. The first good weather after a cold and soggy spring. No one was around, so I shucked my clothing to wash off the horseshoe crabs' effluvia from their breeding orgy. Spring had been very wet and cold. That day was warm and sunny. No one was underneath the bridge. I hauled several females back into the water. A messy task. Done, I decided to take a swim and stripped off my shorts and shirt. Naked. A plunge. I asked my friend to take a photo. Did so and we returned to the city. Showed the photos of my afternoon to the young male door forgetting the nude photos. I flitted through the three and apologized for this error. I thought nothing of it, but they reported that I have shown sexual content and a week later I was informed that the ethics board was investigating the matter. Until then I was banned from the cluboard. I explained it was a mistake and there was nothing pruriant about the photos. They thanked for the meeting and later that week reported that the ethics board had expelled me from the club. So there it is No recourse but to accept their determination. I wasn't surprised. More amazed that I had lasted that long A disappointment to s As you can see from the photo its hardly sexual but these days ay the least My list: Not invited to Kathy Burns birthday party in 1959. Falmouth Foresides Maine Next - lost my scholarship to catholic all boys school in 1969. Atheism__ Persona non grata at Club 57 - 1979 - unfaithful to Ann Magnuson Rejected from the CIA - 1980q,

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL / Tura Santana - 2011

Back in the 1960s, Braintree’s South Shore Drive-In was a popular cinema experience off 128 outside of Boston over the Blue Hills from my suburban development of split-level houses. No one went to the twin screens in the daytime, but on summer nights my father drove my mother and their six children to the open-air theater, where we had watched THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies from the back seat of our station wagon.

We loved the concession popcorn. Teenage girls and boys hung out on the benches. They were not interested in the movies. My brother and I ,once home from the parochial school, changed into tee-shirts and Levis. My mother didn't let us wear them to the movies. She insisted that all her children wear pajamas. I understood for the younger kids, but we helped my father carry in our younger siblings.. Neither my older brother nor I left the station wagon during movies. My mother didn't see the problem.

“I want you ready for bed when we get home and what’s the problem with wearing pajamas?” She thought of us as her babies, even though we were almost teenagers.

“They can’t go to the concession stand dressed like that. They’re almost teenagers.” My father interceded for us. “Other teenagers say things.”

“They shouldn’t care what those hooligans say.” My mother had heard about the wickedness of ‘submarine races’ from the parish priest. His sermons warned girls of boys' wandering hands. My mother had two daughters. Neither was over ten. “The drive-in is for movies. Not sin.”

My mother was never more right than when her opinion was backed up by the Holy Roman Church, but the South Shore Drive-In was more like a Midnight Mass in comparison to the Neponset Drive-In off Route 3.

The single-screen on the Neponset River regularly featured adult fare. Biker and zombie films and were popular as the first show. The second movie sometimes offered soft core bare skin. All an affront to the good citizens of the South Shore.

“These films are filth born from the loins of Satan.” Our pastor, a seventy-year-old Irishman, regularly condemned B-movies in his Sunday sermon. His brogue rang with his devotion to a decades-old celibacy and he sought to enlist altar boys into the ranks of black cloth. None of the boys on the cusp of teenagerism sought to suffer the curse of lifelong virginity, especially not in 1965, which was a good year for go-go girls and outlaw bikers.

My older brother was in 8th Grade. I was thirteen. No more Drive-Ins with my parents. We were too old for that. Across the Neponset River from my hometown was Mattapan with the trolley terminal, several barber shops, a clothes store for teenagers, record shops, restaurants, and a cinema decorated as a Far Eastern temple. Teens from everywhere flocked to Mattapan after school and especially on Saturdays. We were young and young lasted forever in the Sixties.

Nearing the end of the school year, Frunk had kissed a girl at the matinee of the Mattapan Oriental, The upper balcony. Shari had let his hands roam to second base in the pitch-black balcony. My next-door neighbor, Chuckie Manzi, and I had found stroke books in the woods below Chickatawbut Hill. Our hands belonged to the Devil and our souls were lost to God, especially since my atheism had been a work in progress since my best friend in Maine drowned at age eight.

In late-May of 1965 sex movies promoted wickedness. No Hollywood release preached sin more fervently than Russ Meyer’s FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. Torrid ads for Russ Meyer’s B-movie about avenging women in fast cars were splashed across the local newspaper entertainment sections and lurid posters promoted the no-holds barred cinematic experience were plastered on brick walls throughout the South Shore.

The star of the movie was Tura Santana. The buxom lead actress was a mélange of Japanese/Sioux/Irish blood. My hometown was a white suburb, mostly Italians, Irish, and a few Jews. No one in our white suburb was as exotic as Russ Meyer’s star.

The first night showing at the Neponset Drive-In was scheduled for the upcoming Friday. Our parish priest pleaded with Sunday worshipers to tear down these offensive placards and our parents obeyed his edict. Their devout fingers bled from the effort to save their young sons from filth.

One evening my older brother and I salvaged two tattered black-and-white posters of three buxom Amazons proudly standing before a foreign sports car. A Porsche 383. Our next-door neighbor Chuckie reckoned that the sports car was the same model in which the teen idol James Dean had died in 1955. I kept my tattered poster under my bed. My brother stashed his in the attic. My mother would have killed us, if she found one, but we worshipped them as unholy relics of our increasingly rebellious youth.

On Monday morning the boys from 7th and 8th Grades discussed the upcoming Russ Meyer film on the bus en route to Our Lady of the Foothills.

“What do you think they do in the film?” I whispered to our friends.

“No sex, but a lot of flesh and big breasts.” Chuckie’s answer was a good guess. We had seen more than that in the dirty books we had found in the woods.

“There’s only one way to find out for sure.” My brother looked at us and we instinctively knew what we had to do and that week we plotted an expedition to the Neponset Drive-In .

Our plan was simple. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO was playing at the local movie house by the Expressway. David Lean’s epic film starring Julie Christie and Omar Sharif had won almost every Oscar at the previous month’s Academy Award. 197 minutes long. On Friday evening I asked my father for permission to see it with Chuckie and my older brother. My mother objected to my request.

“It’s a love story about godless communists.” She remained a fervent McCarthyite a decade after Tailgunner Joe’s death.

“Pasternak was a great poet, but this is only a love story.” My father had attended college in Maine. He spoke French and overruled her politics. She stormed upstairs and slammed shut the bedroom door.

“Boys, remember when you’re teenagers that your father stood up for your rights.”

“Yes, sir.”

On the cusp of forty, he belonged to another generation, but he was a good father and drove us in the station wagon to the local theater. The early show coincided with the sunset. He would pick us up later. Where he went, we never asked.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL screened twenty minutes later.

Scene time for DOCTOR ZHIVAGO ran over three hours. The theater was a mile from the drive-in, A twenty-minute walking distance or a ten-minute trot. Our scheme was planned to the last detail. Chuckie had even hidden his father’s binoculars under his coat, because we would watch the FAST PUSSYCAT KILL KILL for free from the other side of the river.

Upon arriving at our town theater, a long queue of young boys snaked around the corner. They weren't the type to come to a love story alone. Something was up an we said nothiing. We waved good-bye to my father. He was heading someplace. We never asked where.

“Certainly a long line for a love story,” commented my father.

“Julie Christie is beautiful.” My brother had her magazine photos under his mattress, far from the posters of FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. He was a die-hard romantic and dreamed one day that he would end up with Julie, but it wouldn’t be tonight.

“Yes, she is.” My father liked her too. “I’ll pick you up in three hours.”

We bought tickets and waited out front for several minutes. There was no sign of my father or his car. Several clusters of other pre-teen boys also lingered on the sidewalk. None of us had any intention of seeing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Darkness drenched the eastern sky and stars clustered across the overhead sky. Chuckie nudged my ribs.

“Let’s go.”

The three of us walked down the side street and around the corner we broke into an easy jog. Within minutes we were running over the hilly golf course overlooking the Neponset River.

“There it is,” Chuckie declared from the summit.

The drive-in was packed with cars. The big screen showed ‘Coming Attractions’. Inbound traffic on the Expressway was snarled for the free show. The other boys behind us whooped upon seeing our goal within reach. As we pelted downhill to the river, I recounted the plot of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO to my brother and Chuckie, in case our fathers and mothers quizzed us later. They weren’t fools. We reached the river’s ed

ge to discover that the drive-in was not visible from this vantage point. “We could swim to the other side.” Chuckie suggested and unbuttoned his shirt.

“And how are we going to explain our wet clothes?” My older brother was determined to attend law school and his concern for his permanent record deterred his detours from the straight and narrow.

“We’re not.” I pointed to the highway to where boys filed across the expressway’s bridge. It was a good way to get killed and cars beeped their horns, yet we joined their procession to the opposite bank.

Our next obstacle was a dump rank with the stench of trash burning in the glowing incinerator. We spotted the top of the screen and ran like hounds hunting a fox to the twenty-foot chain-link fence preventing any unpaid entrance to the drive-in. None of us needed to go any farther and we sat on the ash heaps of the garbage dump. Forty-feet high big-breasted women in skimpy clothes filled the screen.

“Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams,” Chuckie spoke the actresses’ names, which he had memorized the poster.

Nothing had prepared us for the female mayhem and violence. No man was safe from the Pussycats’ terror and for the first time in my life I realized that women were not the weaker sex.

Ninety minutes later we walked away from THE END in a state of erotic exhaustion. Amazons drove fast cars in the desert. Rock and roll. Black leather. Big hair. Free. A world unlike our suburb or Boston existed out there, and I was destined to find it.

“Why did they treat men like that?” asked Chuckie.

“Because men treat women worst. Remember last winter when those boys took the girls under the Mattapan Bridge. They slapped them around and made them take off their shirts. Worse things happened to girls and women too.”

“The men in the movie got what they deserved,” said my older brother. We had two sisters and would kill anyone, who messed with them.

Back at the theater showing DOCTOR ZHIVAGO we gave the usher our tickets and sat with the audience. The film had another hour to go. We exited after THE END. My father asked about the movie. We said it was good. As we approached our neighborhood, Chuckie whispered in my ear, “I’m in love with Tura Santana.”

“Me too.” She looked a little like his raven-haired sister, Addy, had been my babysitter. Her breast size was a 36-B. Chuckie had once shown me her bra. It smelled of baby powder.

My older brother and I never met Tura Santana, although years later my good friend, Randy, from tthe pagazine Passion, and I interviewed the director Russ Meyer at the 1984 Deauville film festival. The French loved him and called Russ ‘le Walt Disney of Porno’. Randy and I met him in the elegant Hotel Normandie after an interview with Rock Hudson and told him how much I loved FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL. The aging director looked very soft porn with a fancy Hollywood suit and a silk scarf. The three of us had a couple of drinks at the Hotel Atlantique with the Atlantic in view. Our expenses were covered by Actuel, a counter-culture French magazine. Not drinks. I paid for a bottle of Sancerre wine out of pocket. Almost $30. The big man spoke about his service in the Army’s 166th Signal Photo Company.

“I was 15 and somehow was assigned to a combat film crew. I shot a camera across France, but when I got back to LA I couldn’t find any work, although I did some of the camera work on GIANT.” That George Stevens film was being honored by the Deauville Film Festival. Russ Meyer was promoting his. None had ever received an Oscar nomination.

“Can you remember which scenes?”

“I’m lucky to remember my name, but enough of my blowing wind. You’re here as a journalist. You have to have some questions for me?”

“Only one. What ever happened to Tura Santana?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I explained about my older brother, and countless other boys going to see FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL at a rive-in in 1965.

“Ha, you’re not the first kid to tell me a story like that. I was just trying to make some money. Damn, 1965 was twenty-one years ago. I was in my forties. Up until I shot MOTORPSYCHO, I was a nobody, but I sold the producers that I’d make a film like MOTORPSYCHO with three women. The audience would meet three women unlike any three women on Earth, except for women like Tura Santana. She was real. Now you can find porno everywhere. I still don’t know why they let me make that movie.”

“Me neither, but we were glad they did. Why was Tura so angry?”

“It wasn’t any act. She told me that when she was ten years old, some teenage boys raped her. They got away with it. Tura trained in martial arts and over the next fifteen years anyone trying something on her got paid revenge in full.”

“How?”

“How do you think? She was no act. She was the real thing.”

“What happened to her?”

“I saw her a couple of years ago and you know what the worst thing about my movies. Not that feminists think that I was sexist, because they’re wrong. All my women beat up on men. They even kill them, so I can live with that label. The worst thing about my films is seeing all those beautiful women lose their beauty. Not that I look in the mirror. It makes me feel like crying. Same with Tura, but she hung onto it longer than most, and if I close my eyes I can still see her on the set in the Mojave. I'm old too. But like me, Tura had a good life. Still does. What a woman.”

And she still is.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL 1965

Tura Santana passed away in 2011. She will always be that big beautiful woman on the drive-in screen killing men and will always be a young boy worshipping at her boots. It’s a love thing.

FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL forever.

Charleroi, A Thing Of Beauty

For the centuries, Luxembourg served as a barrier against the invading armies from Northern Europe. The city was surrounded by the thickly forested Ardennes and massive stone fortifications atop sheer cliffs, allowing hundreds of troops to foil the attack of thousands. 

Militarists called the citadel the Gibraltar of the North, and in the autumn of 2011 I was appointed the pseudo-resident writer for an embassy overlooking the chasm of the Petrusse.

At the behest of Madame l'Ambassador. We knew each other from London, Paris, and New York. Even Thailand.

"Bring your evening sear. You will have many occasions to sport it."

It was buried in the top floor of the Fort Observatory and still fit, albeit a little snug.

AP was impressed and said, "I haven't worn my tux in years. You want to borrow my tie."

Friends warned Luxembourg was Europe’s most boring city, but the aeroport was only a 15-hour flight from my family in Thailand. 

The ambassador’s driver greeted me inside the terminal. Marc explained that Madame l'Ambassador was attending a meeting at the EEU headquarters . I was all right with that.

Madame l'Ambassador had warned how her duties ate up much of her days and evenings. Writers were accustomed to the solitary life and I told Marc, as we walked to the Embassy's Jaguar, I said, "I'm a writer. I'm used to the solitary life. Let's go."

The drive to the residence lasted fifteen minutes in the Jaguar with the flag. A gothic mansion atop a cliff overlooking a chasm. The air was autumnal, and I stepped onto the white pebble driveway, thinking, “Very smart.”

Upon arriving at the residence, Marc guided upstairs to an attic room, probably a servant’s quarter in the past century. The single window had a view of the sky.

"There is no one else here. Only you and Madame l'Ambassador and her dog Dido."

For the first weeks, Madame l'Ambassador and I made the rounds of parties, cultural events, and diplomatic ceremonies. She was the most beautiful woman in that city and good company. I told everyone that we were just friends and that was the truth.

Every day I wrote about a hitchhiking trip in the summer of 1974. Boston-the Rockies-Reno-Santa Cruz-Moonlight Beach-Needles-Tulsa-the White Mountains. 1974 and Cross-Country America were far away in time and distance from the clifftop embassy of 2011.

< p> The city was very orderly. Walking from one end to another took about an hours. Nothing was out of place. The locals’ manner was cold, as if I didn’t belong there. I repeated my daily routine with an appalling sameness. Wake up. The ambassador was already gone by the time I came downstairs. I took my coffee at the next-door cafe. I introduced myself to the staff every morning. They never offered their name. At a week, I just greeted them with ‘chus’ and ordered a coffee. Frosty. This wasn’t Germany.

My regime. Wake up - write - eat - drink - -go to event with the ambassador-sleep.

I tried to enjoy myself in purgatory. Luxembourg had good pastry and the Bitburger beer was cheap.