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approached, he motioned for me to take a seat across from him.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I asked, pointing to the can, on which his attention was focused.
    â€œOpen it,” he commanded. To my astonishment, the can was filled to the brim with a fine green powder.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked.
    â€œKief, one of the best grades of smoke,” Tom said. “It was a gift!”
    Instinctively we began rolling joints, as Tom explained that the Castle was going to be used for the shooting of an epic underground flick entitled Ciao! Manhattan . The star, Edie Sedgwick, was the Marilyn Monroe of the underground movie scene. Tony had brought the Castle to the attention of the producers, and the kief was a goodwill offering presented to Tom for his permission to use the house.
    Andrea called out from Tom’s bathroom. She wanted me to keep her company as she tried a hundred different things on and asked me what I thought. She also wanted to know if I had any acid. I unwrapped a piece of foil extracted from my jeans, and we split a piece of filter paper. When she was finally ready, we joined Tom and Geraldine in the main room. Tom, who was already stoned on God knows what, was amusing Geraldine with stories as she lay back on the sofa, gazing up at the ceiling.
    Andrea was going to entertain us with a record of the original soundtrack from Peter Pan sung by Mary Martin. She loved playing the album, especially the songs “I’m Flying” and “I Won’t Grow Up.”
    The acid kicked in, and Andrea sang and played along with the record again and again until she believed she was Peter Pan. Andrea was apparently having a reality crisis in the midst of a drug-induced, hallucinogenic trip. It seemed that the problem she was experiencing in distinguishing reality from whatever metaphysical meteor she’d mounted was leading to a transcendental meltdown.
    At one point, we put Tom in his studio chair, which had casters. Every time Mary Martin sang out “I’m Flying,” we’d hurl him across the room. The evening wore on, and the acid magnified awareness a thousandfold. I could see every pore in Tom’s face and count the hairs on Andrea’s head. I could hardly bear to look at the expressions of others. Everything was grotesquely distorted, hilariously funny one moment and then horribly frightening the next. It all seemed more like a dream than reality.
    The following day, I was sitting down with Tom. We were having a chat about the images and impressions of the night before. Tom thought it would be an excellent artistic project if I tried to capture them in a painting—and furthermore suggested that I paint a surreal, psychedelic impression of the Castle, a painting that would depict how people and events looked to me under LSD, part Hieronymus Bosch and part Marquis de Sade. This was the first real artistic challenge I had faced, for now I had to invent a picture rather than just copy one. For the rest of the summer, I sketched people and scenes, real and imaginary, to incorporate into one all-encompassing masterpiece.
    Ciao! Manhattan was to become an underground movie classic. It was based on the life of Edie Sedgwick, who by 1967 had already assumed mythical proportions in the underground society of New York City. Young, glamorous, and beautiful, she came from an old Boston family. She had moved to New York in the sixties and met Andy Warhol, and together their chemistry sparked the beginning of the pop-art underground culture. Their ideas in fashion and art set a trend for decades to come, and Ciao! Manhattan was to be Edie’s apotheosis.
    Andy Warhol was not involved in Ciao! and was said to have been quite sore about it. It was shot by Chuck Wein and John Palmer, friends of Andy’s who worked with him on movies made at his factory.
    As word of the filming spread, half of the Warhol Factory, including Viva, Eric Emerson, and Paul America, invaded the Castle.