Love Poems: Afterword : ÉDITIONS LUTANIE

Love Poems: Afterword
by Robert Hawkins

The first thing Rene ever said to me was, “I hate you!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’ve got so much hair!”

I’d seen him for the first time maybe a year earlier, in 1978 or ’79, the first person I saw the first time I went to the Mudd Club. He was in the middle of the room, dressed all in green: a pointy green cap, a belted tunic, with his green tights pulled down around his ankles, dancing away.
“Who is THAT?!” I marveled.
“Oooh, that’s Rene Ricard. Watch out for him! He’s trouble,” my friend Bob Fink, who’d brought me there, warned me.
“I can tell,” I concurred as we scooted quickly past him into the crowd.

However many months later, I was brought to Edit deAk’s loft, by Patrick Fox, at Rene’s request. He’d seen a lithograph of an Amazonian man’s face that I’d made back in my school days in Sunnyvale, and he had written a short poem about it.
After the initial remarks about my hair (which was probably in a pretty goth Bang Wars state at that point, big and dyed black) and a few more exploratory exchanges of gunfire and flattery, I thought it might be clever to try to further ingratiate myself to him by relating the anecdote about the Mudd Club.
“The first time I ever went to the Mudd Club I saw you, and you looked amazing. You were dancing, dressed like Peter Pan,” I said. “That wasn’t Peter Pan, you idiot! That was Robin Hood!” he screamed.

In the spring of 1988, he lost his home on East 12th Street in the famous Fire at Rene’s Apartment. Here’s how he related the story to me one time.
He explained that he had lately come to understand that there was a dumbwaiter behind the wall of his apart ment, which was used to lower the bodies of dead graffiti kids
(SK, specifically) into the basement of the building, where they were stuffed with diamonds and taken to the river in underground tunnels, to be smuggled to God knows where...
... anyway... that particular night, he was awoken from his slumber by the sound of a ruby hitting the floor. It was the ruby in his ring, which slipped from his finger as he’d turned, languorously, no doubt, in his sleep. Roused by the tinkle of ruby on wood, he thought he smelled smoke; he opened his eyes a bit and saw the big painting by Stefa no of the man walking through fire hanging over the end of his bed.1 He thought it was just a fitful dream, another paranoid hallucination, until he had another peek, and this time the painting was actually flickering orange, obscured in smoke. He leapt from the bed and ran hysterically out of the building, never to return, never to heed the promptings of friends who insisted “it wasn’t that bad, you should just go back and get everything out of there while you can!” Never to know what had happened to the beautiful little green Francesco Clemente painting of a finger pointing at a frog that had been reproduced in Rene’s Artforum article “The Radiant Child,”2 which sat on the drain board next to the sink, or the row of classic Basquiat drawings leaning against the wall, or my painting of a guillotine leaning next to them, or the man walking through fire, or the myriad other treasures piled up under ashtrays full of Camel butts.
He ran out into the night and became homeless. He wandered the streets, beautiful wilting pilfered bouquets clutched in bejeweled hands, looking helpless, behaving fiercely, Ophelia looking for a puddle to rest in. Eventually he found refuge in places like the National Arts Club, or the Chelsea Hotel, until he’d get thrown out for his destructive behavior and the funny smoke smell in the hallways. Always exclusive, always abusive.
And then from elusive to intrusive. But we still let him in whenever he came calling. Calling our names from the street, because he’d forgotten, or never knew, our buzzer number. Or because our buzzers were broken. Or just be cause we didn’t have phones.
We still invited him in, because he was the most ex traordinarily beautiful vampire ever.

But crack didn’t last forever. It didn’t last very long at all, in fact—fortunately, it became quite unfashionable quite quickly, and Rene was always naturally fashionable, and recognized it was not a good look for him. It didn’t exactly open doors to the grand salons he strove to stride through. So he put down the pipe, and regained a bit of whatever respectability people imagined he had. He calmed down a lot.
During the time he was doing his first poem-art prints for Petersburg Press—uncontrollable, obstinate, high volume and relentlessly unreasonable... the shade of puce was never right... the chartreuse was too yellow—he screamed and cried, and the poor printers were terrified of him, as they realized what an endless nightmare was in store for them.
By contrast, when we were asked to do our book he was in a new phase of creativity, calm(ish) and fairly focused on the project. Our ideas were totally in tune with one an other, and the whole thing was done, without incident, conflict, or hysterics in a matter of weeks.
The book was conceived as a collaboration between us, and proposed to us by Mette Madsen, who had started the CUZ Editions series with Richard Hell. Rene had just written the poem “R de R,” and wanted to get it published quickly. The other poems had been around for a while, and the Lana Turner poem had been published somewhere else earlier, I think.

The pages had already been laid out, with margins on the sides, top, and bottom of the pages with room enough for narrow drawings. I filled each space, turned it all in to Richard Hell, who showed it to Rene, who asked for no changes to what I’d done. I think it took about a week for me to draw it all.
“The last thing I said to him was ‘Goodbye.’”

Robert Hawkins, 2024

1. Stefano Castronovo, aka Stefano, is an Italian artist known for his painted leather jackets and his monumental murals in 1980s New York City.
2. Rene Ricard, “The Radiant Child,” Artforum 20, no. 4 (December 1981).

Robert Hawkins (b. 1951, Sunnyvale, California) is an American artist who lives and works in London. A fabled figure of the 1980s and early 1990s East Village art and punk scene, his work is and has been collected by artists and writers including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn O’Brien, and Jim Jarmusch. Among Hawkins’ first exhibitions was Lower Manhattan Drawing Show, a group exhibition curated by Keith Haring at 77 White Street Gallery above the Mudd Club, in 1981. Recent exhibitions include Somewhere Downtown: Art in 1980s New York, (2022-23) curated by Carlo McCormick and Peter Eleey at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and Robert Hawkins: Dream Mine (2023) at Off Paradise, New York.

This text is featured as an afterword to the book Love Poems, by Rene Ricard, with drawings by Robert Hawkins, re-issued by Editions Lutanie in July 2024 from the original book published by Richard Hell in 1999 (CUZ Editions).