Begging Naked

By Karen Gehres

71:44


01:00:40

Elise: Before I left home, I, I knew that somehow I would meet a pimp and I would have to be, you know, I’d, I’d go and work in the business. I knew it as I was crossing the bridge I had this vision of what I would be doing. You know, and it was a solid thing. In my heart, I was like, yeah you got to, well after your father looking at you saying he’s going to kill you, nothing can scare you in the world. How could that scare you? It was like I’m gonna get my money and I’m gonna get through this world.

01:01:14

Elise: I was drunk. I was, I had a hangover when I went down in the morning and I think I started pushing my food around with my finger which is not done in my house and my mother started bitching at me about using a knife or a fork or ‘knife or fork, why can’t you use a knife or a fork or fork or spoon or knife or fork? Why? What’s wrong with you? What’s the matter with you?’ You know and I started really getting a profound headache and I yelled at my mother. I said ‘Ma, leave me alone.’

01:01:44

Elise: And my father just got up and “PAM!” You know, you don’t speak to your mother, my head went back against the glass. I was seeing stars. He said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ And I just ran out of the house. That was really the last time I saw home.

01:02:05

Elise: I’d walked over the bridge with bare feet, hitchhiked from Jersey to the bridge, got over the bridge, at that point, had a few bucks in my pocket. Cus this man had all this change in his ashtray and I’d managed to steal a handful of it. I had some bucks in my pocket because I um turned like a trick with, basically, you know.

01:02:38

Elise: It’s a snake pit, but it’s a competitive snake pit.

01:02:43

Male: The customer really isn’t looking, necessarily to get laid. He wants intimacy.

Other male: Her eyes would pop out. She was like, ‘My god, you know, we don’t have this in Iowa. We don’t have this back where I come from in Wyoming.’

Male #3: That was just a cesspool. It was the anal canal of the world.

Elise: But we, you know, we’re not paid attention to. They just, they don’t want it to exist at all.

Male #4: Continuous dancing in your face. Talk about 3 dimension.



01:03:09

Male #5: If the person has a dance ticket or a drink or whatever, go sit with him and he’ll feel really good. He’ll talk with them and he’ll feel golden.

Elise: All of a sudden we were really bad people, and you know, we need to move away. Far away.

Bouncer: Don’t be shy step inside Sir.

01:03:39

Elise: First few months of being here were heinous. It was shocking. I still don’t remember a lot of the things that happened to me. I wasn’t even full grown yet and I thought that if I got to 14th street in Manhattan, that I would eventually be able to find my friend who lived on 14th street and went to Parsons.

01:04:03

Karen: So you got to 14th street and-

Elise: And it was an awfully big place.

01:04:13

Elise: I was living in the lower east side, 30 avenue B and that was in, um I lived there from 1977 to 1980 and uh we paid 150 dollars of rent. We shared it. People at that time would just take their garbage and dump it out the window. You know, looking out the window and seeing a mattress just carousing down next to the alley. You’d think, oh god, all the garbage would pile up, no, every summer, someone would light it on fire. It would burn.

01:04:45

Elise: And then the fire department would come and put it out. It was an event. And that was life. That was just the way it was. You know, I had a plan, I was going to be like Xavier Hollander. I’d already read the Xavier Hollander book, the “How to be a Hooker.” I mean to me, if I had like, you know, but you also have to realize that you’re dealing with a naïve mind. A person who really thought if they went to 14th street, they could find somebody by sitting there and watching and waiting.

01:05:08

Karen: But who’d you meet instead?

Elise: Oh this guy Maurice and uh, ended up staying with him for like 7 months. But he wasn’t bad, you know, he taught me a lot about survival, the street, you know, and hustling, and how to make money. My life actually was never the same after him. Obviously, he wasn’t that bad because I made it out alive. I made it out with not a lot of scarring on my body.

01:05:38

Elise: Ok, I mean, I mean there was times that we were having sex that I wish I could have just ended it and stopped but he wouldn’t and he was big and it was painful and it was a lot, like, you know, working and coming in and taking money. There was a lot of fucked up things about it. But he taught me a lot too and he kept me off of heroin.

01:06:04

Elise: I worked on the upper east side, in a, in a pretty decent place, dealing mostly with UN people.

01:06:20

Elise: I could have chosen to do a job under the table. I could’ve gotten a job when I was 15 but I chose to do what I did because it gave me what I thought was control because I had always had like 600 dollars in cash in my pocket and I didn’t think of it in terms of ‘Wow, you could build your future with this money.’ You know, we were paid well and we were always paid well and it was a good job.

01:06:50

Elise: A year’s time, maybe half a year, I was into heroin and got into selling heroin because I was with a guy at the time. I met another guy who didn’t like the fact that I worked as a prostitute and rather me sell heroin. I started getting like thinner and thinner and sicker and sicker and you couldn’t work if you looked that way and they asked me very nicely. They said, ‘Elise, you know, you’re getting bad. You have to take some time off.’

01:07:18

Elise: Oh and my teeth, um, were really so loose that you could wiggle them like this. They were just about to come out of my skull and I got them now, Vitamin C baby. Lots of it. It’s a tough job. Really is for people that want to die. The truth, I truly believe that myself, from my own experiences.

01:07:43

Elise: There was times that I begged to come home. I went, I was on my hands and knees one time to a police officer saying, ‘please officer, take me home. I’m a runaway from New Jersey. He said, ‘Bitch, get the hell out of here.’ I’ll never forget that as long as I live. He kicked me like a dog in the street. And at that point I remember in my own mind saying, ‘nobody loves me, nobody cares about me and now I have crossed the line and I’m going to die.’

01:08:38

Elise: Who is it? Hi. Ok, come right through here through my closet and there’s my kitchen. Sink, the hot plate, the blender, the water filter.

01:09:09

Elise: My little oven here, my mother came up here once and cried. She started crying, ‘if your father could see.’ It was all lined with oil drums full of construction materials. I spent more than 50% of my time trying to get this place looking like I’m a part of some kind of movement of neurotics that clean the corners constantly.

01:09:45

Elise: I mean if I had a squatter from 13th street come up here. You know, she’d think this place was a yuppy palace. ‘Eh, what have you got here,’ you know? My messy bed that I don’t make because I live in a sleeping bag. It’s my souvenir. There’s my toilet.

01:10:19

Sally Roth: In this building, that was where the servants lived and they had, like you know, little cubby holes up there which were apparently broken through and made into little apartments. And you never knew what you were going to find up there. And so I went up and I, I thought it was the closest thing I was ever going to come to, um, a, like a 1910 Parisian hotelier. I thought it was wonderful.

01:10:55

Elise: I used to paint naked in this room when I first moved in here. It was hot as hell so of course I painted naked and it was- there wasn’t anything religious about it. It was just the heat.

01:11:05

Sally Roth: She knows all about all kinds of painting. She knows how to etch. She knows how to restore paintings. She knows how to sculpt. She knows how to make jewelry, all kinds of jewelry. She’s learned it all. So that’s not self-destructive, is it?

01:11:35

Elise: So these were made, like 10 years ago. I wanted to make something to put on Madison Avenue. They were in a gallery for a year. A lot of people went to see them. But um, nobody bought anything. This is my hummingbirds.

01:12:17

Sally Roth: I don’t know if you want to see the one of me. There’s several things in here that are part of, part of my life. Should I say it? Ok, uh, I changed the face a little bit, because she made me look too much like her. (laughs.) And I was annoyed. She also gave me blonde hair and I said, ‘come on, Elise.’ So she darkened the hair a bit, but she did not change the face, I changed it a bit.

01:12:58

Elise: I had a show when I was 18 on West Broadway in Soho.

01:13:31

Elise: I was incredibly bored with um, make lots of objects so I could sell them. Working for stores, doing orders and commissions and selling paintings, basically hustling as an artist for nine years and I, I lived and I lived alright. I did alright. Um, I didn’t do great, you know, some people say well I thought that you would either make it or you would just end up washed out.

01:13:52

Elise: (Funny voice) I’m having a problem. I wonder if you could help me solve it. (Other voice) So what’s the problem, babe? (Voice #1) Jesus, I had such a hard time. I’ve been so upset.



01:14:21

Elise: Even though I’ve done a lot here with my artwork and stuff, considering what I was making in potential I had to make it. I could have really soared, man.

01:14:46

Elise: I’ve got a briefcase.

Karen: Yeah, what’s that for, for your?

Elise: I’d say my resume. Maybe I’ll get very serious. Go out there and see what I can do to exploit myself.

01:15:02

Elise: I had applied for grants. I have a few letters of rejection that I’ve kept the whole thing and it’s very tiresome when you’re trying to work and you’re trying to live. And you know what? Forget all of it. Just forget it. And I didn’t want to be a dishwasher. And I’m not a very good waitress. You know, and I, I don’t know, I could work as a security guard but I’d probably end up falling asleep all night, you know? I wanted to do something that was good for my mind, body and soul.

01:15:50

Ron Kuby; Prior to the election of Rudy Giuliani, Times Square was in many way the sex capitol of the planet. People would come, particularly nice white, blonde hair, blue eyed, cornfed, flag-waving Republican country boys would come into the heart of New York City to go to sex shops and look at videos and see strip shows. It was one of the things that Times Square known for.

01:16:20

Ron Kuby: It was part of the gritty urban life that characterized portions of this city, certainly not all of it, but portions of it. It was one haven, one mecca where people coming from repressed backgrounds and stifling environments could come and experience sex and displays of sexuality in a way they had never seen in public before.

01:17:05

Elise: I believe that everything you do in your life is your art and I brought art into my dancing.

01:17:22

Sally Roth: She was sitting out front of the building with her things out there selling and um we were coming in from some place. It was a Sunday and we said, ‘Elise, it’s getting very cold out here. You better come in. Come on upstairs and have a brandy or something. Let’s, you know, we were freezing. So she came up. And we all had a brandy or she and I did and then she and I had some more brandy.


01:17:56

Sally Roth: And she was, she started talking about, I don’t know how it came up, this place that she had worked in. It was a whorehouse or something. You know? That gave shows.

01:18:21

Elise: And that was too much. I’m tired.

Karen: Are you going to work today?

Elise: I gotta work tonight. I worked last night.

01:18:42

Sally Roth: Then she brought down these paintings that she had done of these women. It was shocking.

01:18:52

Elise: I had the easels set up right on the stage and she would come up on stage and I would pose her in these different positions and I would proceed to paint her with this incredible stress that these men paid to come in to see a live sex show and I was doing a painting on the stage. Some people loved it. You know, it was a good mix of all different walks of life, from ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life.’

01:19:22

Elise: You know? Actually giving them something different to, you know, men that came in, in that really were outraged over the fact that that’s what I was doing up there, that how dare I do that? And when the management knew that I was painting in there and they would come out and complain.

01:19:40

Elise: One of this gimmicks was butt in the, buck in the butt and this is um a ritual where the girl is up on stage and she’s holding on to the pole and um showing the crowd her rear end and um we were, the mc is there saying, ‘ok guys step right up, put the buck in the butt, that’s right it only costs you a buck, you can slap it right between those cheeks.

01:20:05

Elise: This is a, hustling a tip. It was an intensive procedure to get money from this man. As you see, he’s still holding his money. He wants a good look. She’s showing what she’s got for that dollar.

01:20:20

Elise: This is my new friend Contessa. She ended up joining a, um, a commune of jesus freaks.

01:20:27

Elise: She’s doing a face dance. This one is called “A Face Dance.”

01:20:33

Elise: She was hit by a truck and uh, just under being retarded enough to collect social security. We actually had to stop her performing because she ended up attacking men with these pearls. I mean she went nuts with that.

01:20:52

Elise: I enjoy dancing. I enjoy doing, being erotic. I enjoy my shows. I don’t enjoy it when somebody says, ‘Well, aren’t you going to take your dress off and get up on the table?’ I berated somebody yesterday. He says, ‘Come on over here.’ I’m doing my show and you want to watch, that’s fine. If you want to put a dollar on the stage, fine. But don’t tell me to come over here, take my dress off and get on the table. Who the hell do you think you are?

01:21:22

Elise: This is a theater! What the hell did you all think that you walked into? The sign on the door says theater and I’m the actress. Are you paid to be a director here? And hes putting his hands over his head going, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ And he’s throwing money on the table.

01:21:45

Sally Roth: Stripping! Is that what she was doing at this whorehouse?

01:21:50

Elise: You’re in, you’re in show world, buddy. You know, you’re going to see this show of, of genitals doing whatever they do. I mean where do you get to do that on Earth. I do that every night 5 times.

01:22:11

Elise: These are not only samples of the sex industry. This goes beyond. This is a reflection of sexuality unaltered. It’s hard to imagine I did all this art there. Did I make that clear?

01:22:53

Ron Kuby: Suddenly, real estate in New York became incredibly precious and bookstores and other clubs that had obtained rental property suddenly found themselves under siege.

01:23:05

Elise: I used to get 20 dollars a show. Now, the girls are making if 5 dollars a show, if that and they have to hustle tips. The theater in town is in a zoning area that’s scheduled for redevelopment. Most people get like very fearful. Their jobs are at stake and they have kids to feed. Most people who work in the industry have kids to feed.

01:23:40

Elise: It’s a dangerous time for a live show. I know for a fact (?) had a lot of customers. This was there only release from the mundaneness of their world. They would come here and, and literally be transported.

01:23:57

Ron Kuby: What the mayor clearly wanted to do was to drive these businesses out any way he could.

01:24:06

Elise: The conditions just get seedier, the less people give a damn about it. And you know, slough it off to the corners of the world and the darkest corners of reality, yeah.

Ron Kuby: What Giuliani did was to take the whole thing a step forward and made the eradication of these establishments a cornerstone of his mayoral time.

01:24:34

Elise: We’re not paid attention to, you know, cus they don’t want it to exist at all.

01:24:55

Elise: New York is not, it’s become no the town for, for this sort of thing. Where at one time it was the town for this sort of thing but people that moved in have decided that they definitely don’t want this to be part of their thing. They want it out. Whether it just be for economic reasons or just, they want to tidy up a bit.

01:25:20

Ron Kuby: And a lot of people asked, with a whole country devoted to Disney, why is it that this little portion of the planet had to be disnified.

Elise: You know, it makes me sick that I watched it as a child and wasted all of those precious hours of my life because here I am today out of a job.

01:25:50

Elise: What will happen is those women, I, I won’t continue to work in the industry because the only place left to work is show world, is I get paid. I, I don’t want to reduce, be reduced, begging naked.

01:26:08

Elise: The street is weirdly empty. That whole area is like painted like a deserted fun village, like, like if you went to a place like during the winter on Coney Island. What’ll happen is that now that they’ve pushed, you know, thousands of people out of their jobs that they had going there and the entire, you know, upset the entire, whatever was going on there before, which had color and life and movement.

01:26:36

Ron Kuby: So he passed these regulations, which were, on their face, zoning regulations, but what they did was to completely transform the landscape of the sex industry in New York and increasingly people recognized, I think, that there is a place for the sex industry and for adult material in this wonderful giant diverse poly-block city.


01:27:05

Elise: But I’m not there any more. I like dancing and I miss it a lot.

01:27:30

Elise: I got a high energy level. I’m ready to work. I’m ready to work a good job now. I, I just don’t want to go into a situation where I find myself constantly compromising my uh, my aesthetic values. You know, when you look and you’re going, uh, I have to touch that or I have to sit there, or, and it’s the constant every minute where you’re, you know, you’re sort of compromising yourself, you feel like you’re sort of in this very precarious anatomical position.

01:28:05

Sally Roth: For the last two years that I know of, she was going to these places and having free food. But when I would make a great big pot of something, I’d always call her, because I just hated the idea of her going to these food, these free lunch things, soup kitchens.

01:28:35

Elise: Well, I haven’t gotten many offers, just those that continue with my employment at, in the sex industry. Building maintenance, dominatrix at The Vault, or a circuit stripper for many joints all around the country.

Karen: Do any of those seem appealing?

Elise: No.

01:29:02

Elise: All I hope for is that I’m not stripping in a month, I’m not building maintenance in a month, and that I’m doing something cool and exciting that invigorates my, uh, chi, you know?

01:29:55

Elise: It gets lonely and we’re surrounded, surrounded by people. Why? What are you supposed to do, you walk up to somebody and say, ‘I need a hug.’ (noise and funny voice.) ‘I need a hug.’ A simple thing, you know, like, ‘Hi, how is everything? How’s it going?’ All of a sudden I’ve become a deprivileged character. My inner confidence is gone. I know longer feel the strong part of myself and if I squash that then what do you do? That’s it. It’s over.

01:30:35

Sally Roth: I think ’99 was when she kind of went off the wall. We always invited her to our Christmas party and she came to the party this time. She had, you know she has beautiful hair, and she’d taken her hair and done it into little knots all over her head. She didn’t wear any make-up, was very very thin looking. She looked like the weirdest thing you ever saw in your life with these things all over her head and she sat there like this, petting the dog.

01:31:30

Sally Roth: She began to tell me about people listening in on her.

Elise: Some people may not understand but when you got something going on, people are out to destroy. Simple as that. It’s not paranoid. It is paranoid but it’s a good paranoia.

Sally Roth: She began to say that there were people that she’d gone to school with who were now in the FBI.

01:32:00

Elise: It’s been a really strange cold war. You know? Between writing and getting shot at, but being shot at is very strange in New York because it was just your regular day walking right in front of the building, I see this guy in this car and he’s squatting sort of by his rear view mirror. It goes bing, you know, and it hit. One was a little pellet that actually went into my leg and I got really really sick. I started going blind and uh, I just drank a lot of water, you know.

01:32:45

Elise: The women that you see portrayed here, um, were on the road which unfortunately ends in this hiatus of um incredible sexual tension and eventual violence and what occurred here in 1996 is a few of these women, um disappeared, and showed up later as some mannequins.

01:33:25

Sally Roth: After ’99, as I say, I, I began to notice some, you know, very weird things.

Elise: If I’m gonna turn tricks, I’ll turn tricks. If I’m gonna sell paintings, I’m going to sell paintings. I don’t do both together.

Sally Roth: Much thinner, uh, haunted looking.

Elise: I may have done some stuff when I was a teenager and as a runaway when I was 13 to 15 years old. But it has nothing to do with what I’m doing now

01:33:55

Elise: I have been abused since I was a little kid and um the fact that I’m alive is just completely amazing. As I remember, I also have the pain that I had forgotten with the psychotropic drugs. So, (?)

01:34:32

Elise: The two paintings that I did this year were of one, the massacre of my enemy, and that’s this little painting here and they’re done extremely detailed so I could blow them up when I get some money and put them up on billboards. At this time, they’re this size so they can be hidden and smuggled out at any time.

01:35:00

Sally Roth: At one point, she said, ‘I know they’ve got my studio bugged.’

Elise: I’ve definitely been abused and exploited in this building. You have no idea what’s happening to me here. I’ve been injured, raped, tortured. I’ve been dragged out of this place. I’ve been drugged from the neighbors downstairs. Half the place works for the KGB.

01:35:22

Sally Roth: Then, it was this year that she began to tell me about the chip.

Elise: This chip and it’s a computer thing. So now like the overdrive and everything, the people were hacking into Nasa, hacking into the pentagon, and there’s no security. There’s nothing. And so my brain was open air. In other words, every thought, every idea that I had going through my head was going out on the internet.

01:35:52

Sally Roth: I said, ‘How about having the chip removed?’ ‘Oh no, no, I like it. It’s got a lot of memory in it. So I’m glad I have it. I’m glad I have the chip.’ And it was because of the chip that she found out that she was actually the Swanson heiress.

01:36:25

Elise: At this moment, if I face eviction, I will have to bear a wagon and roam the streets. This is loathe to me. And until I sort out the matter of this estate, I have no where else to go. Along with my cat, I’ll be homeless. This is very true. Anybody can see that I’ve been through some fucking shit.

01:36:55

Elise: I’ve never asked for welfare. I’ve never asked for food stamps from the city. And the one time that I get into trouble and I can’t afford to pay for legal assistance and I’m denied legal assistance for no reason. I’ve not even made enough money to pay taxes here and you know, at least, you know, from the funds accessible to me, I have nothing. So it’s really wrong they denied me assistance. Anyway, that’s what I had to say. Don’t get hit by the cars. Here, let’s cross the street.

01:37:36

Elise: My name is Alice Swanson, otherwise known as Elise Bainbridge-Hill and you’re looking right now at an airshaft that was converted into a living artist studio that I’m now being challenged for in court and have to return to on April 26th. After that, who knows depending upon what the decision is, where I will be.

01:38:08

Elise: I have to go to court on the 26th of this month again. It’s going back into court as a summary judgment based on uh, my answer to the people, to the uh, response of the uh, the landlord to our last case, which was Arthur Woods suing me for nonpayment of rent.

01:38:38

Elise: I plead with the court and the landlord to recognize I’ve been here for 20 years, suffering the worst part of my life at this time. I beg mercy of the court for a reasonable amount of time to extend my current condition that I may habitat this airshaft until I gain amnesty elsewhere. Although I do not want to disregard the law, it was my impression, especially 20 years ago that an artist studio allowed the artist to exist therein. It is for me to exist with my work as my work is my life. The minimal subsistence that these conditions allow cannot be confused with the average citizen’s life.

01:39:16

Sally Roth: It’s a New York landlord. They’re, they’re uh, they’re demented and they’re sick and they’re greedy and disgusting, you know, so uh, I, I just assumed it was part of life.

01:39:36

Elise: I got dragged to court but I bought 3 weeks. They’re taking me to court because they said that I have no legal right to be in the space that I have lived in for 20 years. I’ve had these extraordinary experiences and I’m sharing my soul with another and that’s why I talk a little funny, but I’m ok, really. It’s because I’ve been raped and tortured and really simply can’t come out and talk because I get all upset and start crying and ragin and rocking back and forth and they want to put me into the asylum. So, I am not going to the asylum.

01:40:25

Elise: Hey look, look what you just got. I bet this fits you. A new denim jacket. Mr. Harmon said I can’t be on the roof. You know, I mean I’m all right, but I mean, I’m, I’m not ready for the loony bin, but I think this, I’m incompetent to handle the situation.

01:41:00

Elise: I stayed down here last night. Um, there he is. It’ll be ok, honey. I’m really nervous. Right now, my stuff is there.

01:41:35

Elise: I used to be abandoning my reasons, but I secured these paintings, so it’s not like I’m abandoning them. I’ve secured everything. I’m really lost in this world. I’ve been completely taken out. These people put me on some kind of drugs that I can’t, I can hardly think any more, you know?

01:42:05

Elise: It’s a, I’m not doing badly, you know, but, but I used to be a lot more together than I am. I would have, I would not have had this situation. What I’ll probably do is just find a place to sit tonight, you know? And go down to uh see about housing.

01:42:30

Male: Do you have anybody you can stay with tonight?

Elise: No, I’m completely incompetent. I have to declare myself incompetent. What can I do with my life?

01:42:52

Elise: I don’t think this is, you know, this going to happen for me. I think it’s going to be ok. He gave me such a, a certain time to get out, right? But now I’m back in. In other words, I was out. So the idea is that now I’m in again.

01:43:29

Elise: Well, I’m gonna call Ana. And then what I’m gonna do is I’m going to get my cat and get my valuables.

01:43:55

Elise: Hello Ana, this is Elise. You know the girl that’s on the elevator with the blonde hair. You know, from on the roof. I talked to you in the morning sometimes. Yeah, Ana please.

01:44:25

Elise: Hello Ana.

Doorman: Sorry, lady, you can’t do this.

Elise: Do you have the phone number?

Doorman: Sorry. You can’t do that.

Elise: What happened?

Doorman: You can’t stay here.

Elise: Oh really? But even if Ana says I can stay?

Doorman: If Ana says, you can’t stay.

Elise: Pardon me.

Doorman: The landlord says you can’t stay here.

Elise: At all?

Doorman: At all.

Elise: Oh my god. No, no please. I have my, they told me I could come down.

01:44:55

Doorman: Please. I will have, I will have trouble.

Elise: Oh my god. I have nothing.

Doorman: Sorry.

Elise: Oh my god.

01:45:13

Elise: What a trip. They told me that I could go back and get my stuff and bring it down.

01:45:40

Elise: Let me just, can I just get my jacket? It’s hanging on the thing and that would be great. It’s right there, the black jacket.

Cameraman: Elise, you want me to get your valuables?

Elise: I, I can’t now. Look, if I just have a jacket, I’ll be all right, I got to get my cat is upstairs. My cat. My cat is upstairs.

01:46:10

Elise: Ok, could you just, just 3 things, all right? There’s a wooden case, my cat, my jacket. Believe me, you can’t imagine how I appreciate this. This is great.

01:48:05

Elise: Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’m not going to touch you. I’m all right.

01:48:17

Elise: I look all right.

Karen: Yeah, you do.

Elise: Yeah I, I take a bottle of water and go to the toilet, take my clothes off, take a shower in the toilet and I talk to the born again Christians by the church. I’ve got my bible. I got my gideon’s bible, you know, I got the whole thing. I got my new socks and my gideon’s bible and I’m ready and what, you know, like you say, what’s there to worry about? You can get new socks on Tuesday. You know? What’s there to worry about.

01:48:50

Elise: And not only get new socks, you get a whole thing of like toiletries. They say, so you go, so you go there, alright? Then you can go to the soup kitchen every day. You know? I mean you can live well.

01:49:12

Elise: I’ve slept out here. I didn’t sleep the first night. I was terrified. But then, you start to know these guys and, you know, same people, offer me a cigarette, you know.


01:49:32

Elise: So we get a toothbrush for free. So when you’re first homeless they treat you really well. They come by with all this stuff, you know like, here. So they, these are good though, the wipes. Keep these. It’s like trying to say, hey, you know, this is all right. It’s not all right, but it’s all right because and only because there is something else going on, not, it’s not just this. It’s not just disaster, ok?

1:50:10

Elise: I’ve been nuts. I’ve like, you know, I’ve really went nuts. Not bad nuts, but, you know, I had a lot of stress. I went nuts because of the stress. I’m not that hopeful about anything but uh, hope is, you know, look at this place. Yeah, so.

01:50:40

Elise: I have some numbers I got to call, you know. And it’s, it depends upon how bad this is, you know. How long it goes. How bad it’s going to be. I have no way of knowing how bad it’s going to be. Look, they give out female condoms free. I know what’s going on. I know why I’m here. I know what happened and that’s it.

01:51:10

Elise: It’s depressing and fucked up but you know what? It could be a lot more depressing and fucked up if I just, you know, didn’t just succumb to the shit. I don’t know about these things. What kind of soap do I have? I’ve got this soap, that soap.

01:51:55

Sally Roth: All I know is that she’s living in Central Park someplace and she uh, and ‘Oh, I’ve got wonderful friends here.’ And uh, ‘And I really like it.’ And she also, interestingly enough, gave me her mother’s name and phone number. I’ve called there several times and left some rather stern messages. I think they’ve just kissed her goodbye.

01:52:35

Sally Roth: It’s quite often the only thing to do, to just walk away, especially the way the laws are now. You can’t commit anyone anymore. Why shouldn’t she be in a nice place where people will take care of her and give her her medication and where she’ll get food to eat.

01:53:30

Elise: This is Puck. The new babe. He lives with me now outside. And he’s, we’ve had him almost 2 months now. We had him when he was a tiny little kitten. Well, compared to the stress that I had at home, it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s a little less stress than when at home.

01:54:01

Elise: I mean it’s still stressful. Well, it’s cold and it’s damp but you can survive all winter hanging out on the rocks with a piece of cardboard up your ass. And um, you know, you can get your little cat nap in, but they were trying to say that people laying down was disturbing. And uh you know, it wasn’t like there were blankets everywhere. We were just, just laying out with a little something underneath.

01:54:35

Elise: Of course, you’re a single woman, you’re a target, they, they look at you as a single woman feeding her face not making babies. It’s just basically, don’t volunteer any information, you know, select your friends very carefully. You know, the same old news, but, you know, it’s a little heavier now.

01:55:23

Elise: It’s very important to me to be able to do this and get myself the time and wishing back. If I sat there and started crying, saying, ‘it’s cold and I can’t do this,’ when I know that I have the expertise to make myself warm in subzero temperatures.

01:55:42

Elise: I had the choice, all right, of being institutionalized and being interrogated that way or writing and being out here homeless. There’s the five churches that Monday through Friday go and get a big dinner, plus seconds, plus take home. What I do is I eat in those churches and I come here and I make my baskets and I’ve made three baskets now for the rat.

01:56:16

Elise: I’m showing you my pet rat. My cat left and now I have a rat. At the pet store, yeah, $1.49, you can get your own pet rat.

Karen: Cus they feed them to the snakes.

Elise: Yeah, but they make nice little pets.

01:56:38

Elise: When I write what I have in my head, it actually goes towards a central, to a central computer and, and is observed. Crystal, silver, all of this is uh, you know, conducts waves. And, and of course this and a tuning fork at the end, guarantee you’re going to get this writing.

01:57:09

Elise: What I intend is when they finish this, they’re going to realize that I’m one damn good analyst and I’m going to get a much better job. But I gotta clear my name with DC. You can’t just walk in and get a job with the CIA when you’ve got this trail of tears behind you. You know, whenever I run out of money, somebody walks up and hands me some money. Obviously, it’s like, when I start thinking, God, this is all meaningless, I got hurt for nothing and I lost my studio for nothing, everything isn’t for naught.

01:57:42

Elise: As soon as I start thinking that, something happens where it shows me, Elise, that you’re out here for a reason. This is part of your art experience. This is not me going crazy

01:58:05

Elise: I’m gonna sit down, get some coffee.

01:58:23

Sally: Hello! How are you? Hey you’ve got a tan.

Elise: Hi! Yes. Every day in the woods.

Sally: Go ahead, you know, do that in the back room.

Elise: Take my sweaters off in there?

Sally: Yeah. Yeah.

Elise: Oh, ok.

Sally: You know, you always do it like that.

Elise: Oh, ok, that’s better, right? All right.

01:58:55

Sally: I think you’re looking very healthy.

Elise: Yeah, its, this is the best prescription

Sally: I heard right and we have coffee and everything is here and I’ll be out in a few minutes.

Elise: ok.

01:59:12

Elise: Oh man, I haven’t had a bath in 2 weeks. I feel horrible. My head still feels cracked. I’m starting to feel everything now. All these little points and remembering exactly what happened.

01:59:30

Sally: She looks much better. Looks much better, I think than she did this winter. I was really worried.

01:59:37

Elise: Ew, that hasn’t been removed in 2 weeks. Can you smell it?

Cameraman: Yeah, I can smell you.

Sally: Is there soap back there?

Elise: I have soap with me.

Sally: No, I mean, in the, for washing the clothes.

02:00:00

Elise: It’s always intense. I haven’t even taken my clothes off for 2 weeks.

02:00:25

Elise: Squeaking. Squeaking clean. No idea. All of a sudden, all of the exhaustion, my muscles, everything, just runs off the body. Every bit of, you know, every two weeks, it just becomes so fatiguing not to have a shower.

02:00:50

Elise: I’ve been informed that you know I’m on the board now cus I remember everything, so.

Sally: You mean they’re coming to get you?

Elise: Pretty soon. It’s almost time. They’re coming. Now I’m staying in Central Park with my companion.

Sally: Do you have a companion?

Elise: Yeah, I have Joe Murphy.

Sally: Is that his name?

Elise: The air force.

Sally: You’re calling him that?

02:01:20

Elise: No, that’s his name.

Sally: I see.

Elise: So I got my companion to sleep with on a grate with me. You know, it’s a tiny grate but it’s like with a lot of heat coming up.

Sally: Is he a big guy?

Elise: He’s, he’s a little bigger than me and, and, but he’s-

Sally: Tough?

Elise: We work really well together. We got attacked by this idiot with the pearl man (?) but we were sleeping up in the rain, up in the Frick. And everybody sleeps there and this guy decided that we weren’t going to sleep in the Frick.

Sally: Is that in the, in the garden of the Frick?

02:01:56

Elise: No, it’s up in the foyer, in the doorway.

Sally: Oh, ok.

Elise: So he gets his broomstick and he starts threatening. Well, I pull out my pipe and he pulls out his knife. He takes the front, I take the back, the guy, but we weren’t going to sleep there, because it was like too much, you know. Too much hassle, you know.

Sally: Sure

Elise: You don’t want to go to sleep and some idiot’s there going to kill you.

Sally: No, no.

02:02:22

Elise: It starts here, I don’t know, and he interviews with Sally.

02:05:35

Elise: This is the man who runs. Now, this man he is the one who gets up and you know it’s 5. He passes by me and then at this time, I’m not lying, 6:30, I guarantee, it’s 6:30. Yeah and that’s my clock. His running is my clock.

02:06:25

Elise: Oh Andy gets back til, you know, 7:30, 8 o’clock and then the bag comes open. Then I go to the bathroom.

02:06:45

Elise: I don’t have any place to go and I stay outside.

02:08:30

Elise: I um, it’s been about 6 hours.