Subduing the
Demons in America
An Interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 7

Grasping At Emptiness
“I knew Robert Mapplethorpe at the very beginning of his career. My designer [of the early record albums] George Delmerico went to Pratt with Bob. I forget the timeline now as to whether it was the early seventies or 1970. I was at St. Marks Church the first time Patti [Smith] performed. Robert was there and I knew Robert then [February 10, 1971]. I knew him through Patti Smith and of course before he became the famous photographer, we lived just a
couple blocks away, .

“Even though Robert and I were friends we had a slight problem in our relationship. In my book, You Gotta Burn to Shine, I wrote about his death. It was all true but I think presented an unkind view of him. I regret that. At the end of his life there was no question that he had made many deals with the devil because of his attachment to money and fame. No real devil, it was a reflection of his mind.

“There was also his drug habit. He used a lot of cocaine, maybe be a thousand dollars a day. He was often short of money and he lived an extravagant lifestyle. If you visited him in his loft on a Monday morning, as I had on occasion, there was no question about it–it looked like The Mineshaft. In Bob’s case it was about something else. It was about magic, working with magic in a certain way. He was always very friendly to me, smiling ‘John, how are you?’ But we were not friends. Somehow he had a dislike of me being a Tibetan Buddhist.We worked together and in 1974 he did an album cover of Sugar, Meat and Alcohol for me. There was something Robert disliked about me, which he was totally inarticulate about. William Burroughs lived downstairs so occasionally Bob would be invited here and I’d see him. He had a connection to William because there was a sort of black quality there.We were not heart brothers the way he and William were. Even though they did not see each other that much Bob loved William in a way he did not love me. Maybe it was about heroin and black magic.

“Having a grande mal seizure at the moment of death as Robert did is the very worst. I wish I had written about him a bit more lovingly. In that piece I just presented the facts as I knew them. What I was doing in that piece was juxtaposing it [Robert’s death] with a peaceful death like that of my good friend [Buddhist practitioner/author] Terry Clifford. That was the concept of that piece.

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection

Pornographic Poem/John Giorno