Tuli Kupferberg

In 1993 I worked as the assistant manager of the Classic Bookshop on the concourse of the World Trade Center. Several weeks after the February 26^th bombing, after we had removed the billowy black ash that had settled on all the books and shelves, Classic reduced its stock in a fire sale. On an ordinary Friday, our best day of the week, the store would take in an average of $7,000. On the best day of the sale — when prices had been cut fifty to seventy-five percent — we took in over $30,000.

One quiet weekday morning shortly after the sale had begun I was called to the front of the store. One of the cashiers had been presented with a gift certificate and didn’t know whether it ought to be redeemed.

I had never seen him in the store — but I recognized the customer with the gift certificate. And I had noticed him when he had come in. A slight man with a step that might have given an impression of frailty, his mask-like face emanated self-possession. As I now know, he would turn seventy that year, but his evident age — more than twice mine — drew my attention to his clothes. In the World Trade Center, our customers were bankers and traders or were drawn from the nearly 40,000 office workers in the towers above us whose costumes were mostly functional, and hard to tell apart. The store’s best-selling subjects — we had tables devoted solely to stacks of Frank Fabozzi‘s Handbook of Mortgage Backed Securities — were banking, investment, business, and computer manuals. “Poetry not sold here” (an inevitably disappointing shelf or two was tried out later). And although I did wait on Lawrence Joseph once (and Ray Sokolov, a poet of another kind, who refused to be flattered by my recognizing him from the photo on the jacket flap of his irreplaceable biography of A.J. Liebling, Wayward Reporter) we were not patronized by poets and we were not accustomed to waiting on elderly gentleman in clothes of many colors — and textures. Not that this customer’s clothes were garish. Even the mauve scarf complemented his meadowy palette. And the clothes were clean and new, those of a natty bohemian.

The gift certificate was bright and crisp, a single fold in the middle. Its corners and edges were still sharp. It looked new, but I had never seen one like it. The color was lighter. There was the corporate logo — but the font was different.

The amount: $7.50. It wasn’t even in the denomination of a gift certificate but was the balance or remainder of a partially used gift certificate. Who had given the gift and what its original value had been were not displayed.

The date of issue? I don’t remember the date. But I remember the year. The gift certificate, or what was left of it, had been issued in 1979. And the bearer was Tuli Kupferberg, the poet, singer, and self-described “world’s oldest rock star,” who died this Monday at age 86.

Like most people who didn’t know him, I knew Tuli first through the Fugs, introduced to me by an uncle in the form of their vinyl record album It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest and their song “Wide, Wide, River” which, since I rarely consulted album covers or notes, I have ever since referred to as “River of Shit,” after its chanting lyric.

In his biography of Paul McCartney, Barry Miles writes that Paul would sign his autograph “Tuli Kupferberg” whenever pushy tourists called upon him to sign one.

When I got to New York Tuli was still a presence — you could see him perform at St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, or buy his drawings on St. Mark’s Place, or see them in the Voice, and I’ve never outgrown the sensibility enshrined in his collection Teach Yourself Fucking, which I bought for the title and the photos of Tuli on the cover hoisting his boner. (The two-star review on Amazon is titled “I didn’t learn anything from it” and pleads, “Please don’t mistake this for an instructional guide, as I did.” There are two kinds of people in the world.)

I regret that I did not record his purchase. I do remember that he browsed the store for a length of time that indicated careful consideration. As the price of books rose, the relative value of the gift certificate declined but the sale restored its original buying power. Having been given the gift in 1979, and having found little in the store to recommend it (I imagined), Tuli had waited for an opportunity that wouldn’t be bettered. Where had he kept that piece of paper all those years? How had he known where to put his hands on it when he needed it? (There’s something scrupulous about this that is at odds with Tuli’s anarchic persona.) What did he find among all that drek?

In 2007, I worked in an office across the street from Housing Works bookshop on Crosby Street. Every other day or so I would wander over to cull the dollar book carts that have supplied my library (or “hoard,” if you must) for the last 15 years. The competition between the carts sometimes gets a little huffy. The books are only a dollar, after all, and there are treasures in there. The space is tight. There’s only room for one. One day, rounding a cart, I found the space between two of the carts blocked by a man, down on his hands and knees, peering at the bottom row of the cart. It was Tuli. The last time I saw him. I joined him and his armful of books at the cash register. “Are you still buying books at your age?” I said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” “I know,” he said, smiling, in his whispery croak, “but I can’t help myself.”