Caveat Emptor Read Online Free PDF

Andrea and Geraldine were already ensconced. Lionel Goldbart, a poet from the Beat generation, came with his guitar, sunglasses, and bongo drums. He was tall, handsome, extremely intelligent, and hopelessly addicted to heroin. He was working on a new calendar that he claimed would “completely change the world as we know it.”
    Chuck Wein and John Palmer arrived in a caravan of limousines bearing Edie Sedgwick, the cast, the camera crew, and an entourage of friends. Two trucks hauling equipment followed behind. Lights, cameras, and boxes full of costumes were carried into rooms below Tom’s that opened up onto the lawn.
    After Edie and her friends settled into various rooms in the Castle, a party that would last for days got under way. Music blared from Tom’s studio, and caterers delivered trays of food and wine by the case. When Tom introduced me to Edie, I thought she was very cool and very hot. She was wearing a lime-green minidress with a large gold zipper right up the middle of it. Her eyes were big and soft, enchanting to look into. She possessed an uncanny hypnotic attraction. Edie was very sweet, but she spoke so softly and so low I thought she was about to fall asleep. I noticed there were pills scattered on the floor. Tom and I headed for a table set up with a buffet of sandwiches and salads.
    â€œWhat are all those pills doing all over the floor?” I asked him.
    â€œOh, those,” Tom said. “Well, Edie just threw a handful of them at somebody who didn’t bring her the kind of Danish she likes.”
    After the crew set up the cameras and equipment for the shoot, people began to appear around the Castle in very strange costumes. The reason was made clear when John Palmer explained the story line to me. According to the script, Edie had been ordered by some mysterious member of the underground to leave Manhattan and go to the Castle, which was designated as a “contact point.” There she would meet the “saucer people”—i.e., friendly beings from outer space who would show her how to save the planet from destruction. That was all logical enough, I thought. But what I found puzzling was that the saucer people weren’t limited to just plain old Martians, but included cowboys, drag queens, circus acrobats, soldiers, fashion models, and several who simply defied description. They even had Allen Ginsberg dressed in the beads and robes of an Eastern mystic to greet her.
    After a lengthy shoot in Tom’s studio, the climax of the filming occurred when Chuck Wein asked everyone to follow Ginsberg, who had shed his robes and was completely naked, down into the caves in the cliffs for a shoot of Allen leading us in a hedonistic chant.
    Tony was missing all the excitement, but he wasn’t interested in watching the film shoot. Instead, he was making a movie of his own with two young models, even Edie herself, in his bedroom upstairs. “And besides,” he said when I knocked on his door to see if he wanted to come downstairs and get something to eat, “I’m sick of looking at Allen Ginsberg walking around with his dick hangin’ out!”
    To cap the summer off, Tony got opening-night invitations to the Electric Circus. Heralded as the ultimate psychedelic disco, it was purportedly designed to employ a light show that would mentally induce its patrons into a hallucinogenic trip without the use of drugs.
    Despite the promoters’ claims, we weren’t taking any chances, and on the night of the event Tom, Tony, Joyce, and I dropped acid, jumped in the car, and headed for St. Mark’s Place. Inside, the place was packed with celebrities and the underground elite in outlandish “otherworldly” fashions. As soon as we entered the main room, we met Allen Ginsberg, beads, robes, and all. To the deafening sound of “Eight Miles High” and “Light My Fire,” we worked our way to the second floor and joined a group of